by Mark Gabrish Conlan * Copyright (c) 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan * All rights reserved
I ran Charles the 1936 film The Devil Is a Sissy, a rather oddly titled MGM film based on a story by director Rowland Brown about Claude Pierce (Freddie Bartholomew), product of a British architect father (Ian Hunter) and an American socialite mother (Katherine Alexander) who have divorced before the film begins and who each have custody of Claude for six months out of every year. As the story opens Claude has just moved in with his dad after the six months with his mom, and he's relieved -- only dad, not being able to get work, is living in a tenement neighborhood. Claude tries to befriend the two boys leading the local street gang, "Buck" Murphy (Jackie Cooper) and "Gig" Stevens (Mickey Rooney), whose father is being executed for murder that very night. The story deals with the inner conflicts inside Claude between the socially responsible values of his father and the budding criminals in the streets who, as virtually the only people his own age he sees, he wants to accept him -- and of course their solemn warnings that he never "squeal" about anything they do, or else.
The dramatis personae also include Rose Hawley (a subtle and beautiful performance by Peggy Hawkins), who in situations described surprisingly explicitly for a Production Code-era film is living with an older man who's supporting her financially but refuses to marry her. The plot deals with Gig's and Buck's attempt to raise the money for a tombstone for Gig's father, Claude's suggestion that they rob rich people instead of just picking on people in the tenement neighborhood who have no more money than they, and Claude's setup -- he leads them to an empty house and has them break in and steal valuable toys that are actually Claude's property. The three are arrested and Gig and Buck are placed on probation, and when they decide to try to get out of town rather than report to their probation officer, Claude intercepts them at the cemetery where Gig's dad is buried and tries to get them to go back -- only they're kidnapped by three adult crooks and Claude gets them rescued because they happen to stop at a French restaurant and Claude, the only person there besides the proprietor who knows French, tells the proprietor in French to call the police. But because the night was cold and wet, Claude gets pneumonia and it's touch and go at the end whether he's going to live.
There's a happy ending -- Claude lives, the two other boys become his fast friends and determine to live law-abiding lives, and Rose ends up coupled with Claude's dad -- but for the most part The Devil Is a Sissy is a surprisingly dark movie, especially for MGM in 1936, not only thematically but visually. Much of it is shot in intense darkness, making it difficult to see what's going on but also ably communicating the netherworld in which Gig and Buck are living and into which they're attempting to drag Claude. The Devil Is a Sissy was originally intended as a project Brown would both write and direct, and he started shooting the film but was fired in mid-project and replaced with MGM's all-purpose relief director, W. S. "Woody" Van Dyke, whose reputation for being able to shoot quickly (his nickname on the lot was "One-Take Woody") got him the assignment to rescue a lot of troubled projects other directors had half-finished.
The American Film Institute Catalog quotes a Daily Variety report from August 4, 1936 to the effect that all the finished film except for one or two scenes was directed by Van Dyke (who got sole on-screen credit at a time when director credits were solely up to the studio, before the Screen Directors' Guild was recognized as a bargaining agent and given the right to arbitrate conflicts over credits), but that's belied by the dramatic differences in appearance between the tougher, grittier scenes -- shot in a chiaroscuro style that anticipates film noir -- and the lighter, brighter sequences that are obviously the work of the MGM house guys who were put on the film to lighten it up after Brown was let go: Van Dyke, writers John Lee Mahin and Richard Schayer (who were probably responsible for that ghastly hearts-and-flowers finish in the hospital) and cinematographer Harold Rosson -- who replaced George Schneiderman, the great cameraman on John Ford's silent classics, who presumably shot the footage Brown directed), including a silly song called "Say Ah!" by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown that wrenches us out of Rowland Brown's dark world and back to MGM sweetness-and-light.
I also suspect it was Brown who was responsible for one of the most surprising performances in Mickey Rooney's career -- surprisingly because he powerfully underplays his role and is therefore more effective than usual (just compare his work here with his scenery-chewing in a similar role in Boys' Town). Who'd have thought that Rooney, whose name practically became synonymous with rancid overacting, had the makings of a subtle, powerful performer in him?
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Dressed to Kill (Universal, 1946)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan * Copyright (c) 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan * All rights reserved
I watched a TCM showing of the last film in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes series, Dressed to Kill (not to be confused with the Brian de Palma production from 1980 which had the same title but a totally different plot), which was a “last movie” in more ways than one. It was not only the last appearance of Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson (Rathbone played Holmes again in a short-lived stage production on Broadway in 1953, but Bruce – who was supposed to be in it with him – died just before it opened, Martyn Green replaced him as Watson and the show flopped, which Rathbone blamed on Bruce’s untimely death) but one of the two last films directed by Roy William Neill before his death (Black Angel, a film noir based on a Cornell Woolrich novel with strong similarities to Phantom Lady and an excellent cast headed by Dan Duryea and Peter Lorre, was the other) and the last Hollywood film made by Patricia Morison before she ran out her Universal contract, fled the movie capital and made a major comeback as the female lead in the original Broadway production of Cole Porter’s musical Kiss Me, Kate.
The 1946 Dressed to Kill hasn’t had especially good press over the years – Clive Hirschhorn’s book The Universal Story calls it an “unmitigated dud” – but it’s been a film I’ve always liked and it was certainly a vast improvement over the two immediate predecessors in the series, the unspeakably dull Pursuit to Algiers and Terror by Night. Dressed to Kill was essentially a remake of Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, recycling the basic plot gimmick of a coded message written in several parts, each meaningless without the others, which both Holmes and the crooks are after – only instead of the secret of a new bombsight it’s a set of stolen Bank of England plates for printing five-pound notes; instead of stick-figures of dancing men the message is encoded in three music boxes made by a convict at Dartmoor Prison who stole the bank plates and was arrested 15 minutes later, but in the meantime had hid them somewhere in London and refused to reveal their whereabouts; and instead of Professor Moriarty the leader of the crooks is a woman, Mrs. Hilda Courtney (Patricia Morison, who acts the part with such icy, glacial perfection that one’s almost sure that if there ever was a Mr. Courtney she probably knocked him off for his money), who’s got a disgraced colonel (Frederick Worlock) and an Arab chauffeur, Hamid (Harry Cording), on her string.
It’s not much of a movie – Rathbone was clearly pretty bored with the Holmes role by then – but at least it’s exciting, notably in a surprisingly topical scene in which the baddies have kidnapped Holmes, tied him up, hung him by a meat hook and are proposing to asphyxiate him in a garage not with plain ol’ carbon monoxide but with a special gas used by the Nazis in their extermination camps (fortunately Holmes – or at least Basil Rathbone’s stunt double – is agile enough to escape), and though he acts Watson as a comic-relief doofus as usual (including one scene in which he amuses a child witness, played by Anita Glyn, by quacking like a duck), Nigel Bruce does get to give his partner two key pieces of information that help Holmes crack the case. It was actually a nice way for the series (and for Neill’s directorial career) to end.
I watched a TCM showing of the last film in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes series, Dressed to Kill (not to be confused with the Brian de Palma production from 1980 which had the same title but a totally different plot), which was a “last movie” in more ways than one. It was not only the last appearance of Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson (Rathbone played Holmes again in a short-lived stage production on Broadway in 1953, but Bruce – who was supposed to be in it with him – died just before it opened, Martyn Green replaced him as Watson and the show flopped, which Rathbone blamed on Bruce’s untimely death) but one of the two last films directed by Roy William Neill before his death (Black Angel, a film noir based on a Cornell Woolrich novel with strong similarities to Phantom Lady and an excellent cast headed by Dan Duryea and Peter Lorre, was the other) and the last Hollywood film made by Patricia Morison before she ran out her Universal contract, fled the movie capital and made a major comeback as the female lead in the original Broadway production of Cole Porter’s musical Kiss Me, Kate.
The 1946 Dressed to Kill hasn’t had especially good press over the years – Clive Hirschhorn’s book The Universal Story calls it an “unmitigated dud” – but it’s been a film I’ve always liked and it was certainly a vast improvement over the two immediate predecessors in the series, the unspeakably dull Pursuit to Algiers and Terror by Night. Dressed to Kill was essentially a remake of Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, recycling the basic plot gimmick of a coded message written in several parts, each meaningless without the others, which both Holmes and the crooks are after – only instead of the secret of a new bombsight it’s a set of stolen Bank of England plates for printing five-pound notes; instead of stick-figures of dancing men the message is encoded in three music boxes made by a convict at Dartmoor Prison who stole the bank plates and was arrested 15 minutes later, but in the meantime had hid them somewhere in London and refused to reveal their whereabouts; and instead of Professor Moriarty the leader of the crooks is a woman, Mrs. Hilda Courtney (Patricia Morison, who acts the part with such icy, glacial perfection that one’s almost sure that if there ever was a Mr. Courtney she probably knocked him off for his money), who’s got a disgraced colonel (Frederick Worlock) and an Arab chauffeur, Hamid (Harry Cording), on her string.
It’s not much of a movie – Rathbone was clearly pretty bored with the Holmes role by then – but at least it’s exciting, notably in a surprisingly topical scene in which the baddies have kidnapped Holmes, tied him up, hung him by a meat hook and are proposing to asphyxiate him in a garage not with plain ol’ carbon monoxide but with a special gas used by the Nazis in their extermination camps (fortunately Holmes – or at least Basil Rathbone’s stunt double – is agile enough to escape), and though he acts Watson as a comic-relief doofus as usual (including one scene in which he amuses a child witness, played by Anita Glyn, by quacking like a duck), Nigel Bruce does get to give his partner two key pieces of information that help Holmes crack the case. It was actually a nice way for the series (and for Neill’s directorial career) to end.
Friday, November 5, 2010
A Bucket of Blood (Alta Vista/American International, 1959)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked out was A Bucket of Blood, an old favorite of mine that I hadn’t seen in years which I recorded from Turner Classic Movies’ recent Hallowe’en marathon of horror films. It’s basically the third version of Mystery of the Wax Museum/House of Wax, only this time instead of a master sculptor who lost his ability to work when his hands were injured in a fire, the protagonist is Walter Paisley (Dick Miller), a no-talent nerd who works as a busboy in a Beatnik coffeehouse, the Yellow Door (the year is 1959, the setting is Los Angeles and the director, Roger Corman, did a nice job finding seedy-looking sites in the underbelly of L.A.). In the opening scene he hears heavy-set poet Maxwell H. Brock (Julian Burton) declaim a long and not especially well-structured poem whose details are a bit muddy but whose overall message is clear: that artists are the only truly “alive” human beings, that everyone else is dead inside and therefore artists have the right to do whatever they have to do to create, no matter how many non-artists end up as collateral damage.
We find that Walter takes this a lot more seriously than Maxwell does when Walter quotes back some of the lines to him and Maxwell says, “I’ve forgotten that already” — Maxwell said he was just improvising and he never says the same thing twice because then it would no longer be spontaneous. Walter, who’s being harassed by his boss (Antony Carbone) for spending too much time chatting up the Beatniks at the coffeehouse tables and too little time taking away their empty cups, leaves work and goes to his empty apartment, where he hears mewing from inside the walls and he realizes that somehow his landlady’s cat has got caught inside the walls. Attempting to rescue the cat, he stabs the wall with a knife, hoping to cut a hole in the sheetrock and create an opening the cat can get out of; instead he accidentally kills the cat, tears open the sheetrock and retrieves it (it’s actually a stuffed cat, quite obviously dead for a long while instead of recently killed, and Charles said that for him that was the moment when this film turned silly). Then — leaving his knife stuck in its side — Walter plasters the cat with modeling clay he had bought to attempt a sculpture of his crush object, coffeehouse regular Carla (Barboura Morris), without success (as he molds a piece of clay that’s supposed to go in the middle of her face, he calls out to it, “Be a nose!,” repeating it with more frustration and exasperation each time), lets it dry overnight and asks the boss to let him exhibit it at the coffeehouse.
Walter becomes an instant star in his isolated little Beatnik world, and Carla and the other regulars tell him how impressed they are with his work and how eager they are for him to make more pieces. One woman, Naolia (Jhean Burton), likes the piece so much she slips Walter a packet of heroin, without telling him what it is — and being the total naïf that he is, he has no idea why Lou (Bert Convy), one of two undercover cops staking out the Yellow Door for evidence of drug dealing, comes to his place that night to arrest him. Panicking, Walter wallops Lou with a frying pan, killing him, then gets a knock on his door from his landlady, who heard their voices arguing and the sound of something hitting something and was coming in to investigate. Walter hides Lou’s body in some sort of loft within the apartment, though one of his arms dangles and it drips blood over the floor, which Walter catches in a handy bucket (hence the film’s title) before he covers Lou’s body with modeling clay and exhibits him at the coffeehouse as his second sculpture. A professional model offers to pose for Walter — big mistake, as he turns her into yet another victim — and Walter also catches a worker on an electrical saw, saws his head off and turns it into his first bust.
The pieces he’s so ghoulishly created thus far become the basis of a show at the coffeehouse, and Walter is assured he can make at least $25,000 from what he’s created so far — and he asks Carla to pose for his next sculpture. At first she agrees, until she spots a finger on Lou’s corpse that Walter missed while covering it with clay and realizes just how Walter has made his “art.” There’s a chase scene in which he goes after her and the police go after him, and they ultimately find Walter in his apartment, having hanged himself — “his final piece,” one of the Beatniks says as the film ends.
A Bucket of Blood is fine in the opening scenes — the counter-cultural pretentiousness behind the Beatnik movement is effectively ridiculed by writer Charles B. Griffith (and, uncredited, Julian Burton, who himself wrote the poem he recites in the opening scene), and director Corman gets really good atmosphere in spite of having to shoot the whole thing in a mere five days. It gets a little hell-bent towards the end, when it has to resolve its plot issues in a limited amount of running time (according to imdb.com, the standard U.S. version runs 66 minutes but there’s a version from Argentina that’s nine minutes longer) and speed up the amount of blood being shed (in buckets or otherwise) to pursue Walter’s twisted (to say the least!) artistic vision, but overall it’s a quite good black comedy and an appealing spoof of both Beatniks and the horror genre — and though the actors are virtually unknown (only Bert Convy went on to any kind of stardom — and he did it on TV, not film) the musical component is in excellent hands: the jazz score is by Fred Katz, the saxophone (and, uncredited, flute) solos are by Paul Horn — who also appears in person as a musician playing in the Yellow Door — and when the music shifts from jazz to folk (a ballad about murder by Ewan MacColl — the Scottish folksinger who married Pete Seeger’s sister Peggy and was refused admission to the U.S. because of his Leftist politics; virtually all his songs were political but one of the few that wasn’t, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” became an enormous U.S. hit — but for Roberta Flack, not him — and another song, a traditional Russian Gypsy piece called “Gari, Gari”), the songs are sung by Alex Hassilev, who would end up as one-third of the Limelighters, a major folk-comedy nightclub attraction in the early 1960’s.
The film I picked out was A Bucket of Blood, an old favorite of mine that I hadn’t seen in years which I recorded from Turner Classic Movies’ recent Hallowe’en marathon of horror films. It’s basically the third version of Mystery of the Wax Museum/House of Wax, only this time instead of a master sculptor who lost his ability to work when his hands were injured in a fire, the protagonist is Walter Paisley (Dick Miller), a no-talent nerd who works as a busboy in a Beatnik coffeehouse, the Yellow Door (the year is 1959, the setting is Los Angeles and the director, Roger Corman, did a nice job finding seedy-looking sites in the underbelly of L.A.). In the opening scene he hears heavy-set poet Maxwell H. Brock (Julian Burton) declaim a long and not especially well-structured poem whose details are a bit muddy but whose overall message is clear: that artists are the only truly “alive” human beings, that everyone else is dead inside and therefore artists have the right to do whatever they have to do to create, no matter how many non-artists end up as collateral damage.
We find that Walter takes this a lot more seriously than Maxwell does when Walter quotes back some of the lines to him and Maxwell says, “I’ve forgotten that already” — Maxwell said he was just improvising and he never says the same thing twice because then it would no longer be spontaneous. Walter, who’s being harassed by his boss (Antony Carbone) for spending too much time chatting up the Beatniks at the coffeehouse tables and too little time taking away their empty cups, leaves work and goes to his empty apartment, where he hears mewing from inside the walls and he realizes that somehow his landlady’s cat has got caught inside the walls. Attempting to rescue the cat, he stabs the wall with a knife, hoping to cut a hole in the sheetrock and create an opening the cat can get out of; instead he accidentally kills the cat, tears open the sheetrock and retrieves it (it’s actually a stuffed cat, quite obviously dead for a long while instead of recently killed, and Charles said that for him that was the moment when this film turned silly). Then — leaving his knife stuck in its side — Walter plasters the cat with modeling clay he had bought to attempt a sculpture of his crush object, coffeehouse regular Carla (Barboura Morris), without success (as he molds a piece of clay that’s supposed to go in the middle of her face, he calls out to it, “Be a nose!,” repeating it with more frustration and exasperation each time), lets it dry overnight and asks the boss to let him exhibit it at the coffeehouse.
Walter becomes an instant star in his isolated little Beatnik world, and Carla and the other regulars tell him how impressed they are with his work and how eager they are for him to make more pieces. One woman, Naolia (Jhean Burton), likes the piece so much she slips Walter a packet of heroin, without telling him what it is — and being the total naïf that he is, he has no idea why Lou (Bert Convy), one of two undercover cops staking out the Yellow Door for evidence of drug dealing, comes to his place that night to arrest him. Panicking, Walter wallops Lou with a frying pan, killing him, then gets a knock on his door from his landlady, who heard their voices arguing and the sound of something hitting something and was coming in to investigate. Walter hides Lou’s body in some sort of loft within the apartment, though one of his arms dangles and it drips blood over the floor, which Walter catches in a handy bucket (hence the film’s title) before he covers Lou’s body with modeling clay and exhibits him at the coffeehouse as his second sculpture. A professional model offers to pose for Walter — big mistake, as he turns her into yet another victim — and Walter also catches a worker on an electrical saw, saws his head off and turns it into his first bust.
The pieces he’s so ghoulishly created thus far become the basis of a show at the coffeehouse, and Walter is assured he can make at least $25,000 from what he’s created so far — and he asks Carla to pose for his next sculpture. At first she agrees, until she spots a finger on Lou’s corpse that Walter missed while covering it with clay and realizes just how Walter has made his “art.” There’s a chase scene in which he goes after her and the police go after him, and they ultimately find Walter in his apartment, having hanged himself — “his final piece,” one of the Beatniks says as the film ends.
A Bucket of Blood is fine in the opening scenes — the counter-cultural pretentiousness behind the Beatnik movement is effectively ridiculed by writer Charles B. Griffith (and, uncredited, Julian Burton, who himself wrote the poem he recites in the opening scene), and director Corman gets really good atmosphere in spite of having to shoot the whole thing in a mere five days. It gets a little hell-bent towards the end, when it has to resolve its plot issues in a limited amount of running time (according to imdb.com, the standard U.S. version runs 66 minutes but there’s a version from Argentina that’s nine minutes longer) and speed up the amount of blood being shed (in buckets or otherwise) to pursue Walter’s twisted (to say the least!) artistic vision, but overall it’s a quite good black comedy and an appealing spoof of both Beatniks and the horror genre — and though the actors are virtually unknown (only Bert Convy went on to any kind of stardom — and he did it on TV, not film) the musical component is in excellent hands: the jazz score is by Fred Katz, the saxophone (and, uncredited, flute) solos are by Paul Horn — who also appears in person as a musician playing in the Yellow Door — and when the music shifts from jazz to folk (a ballad about murder by Ewan MacColl — the Scottish folksinger who married Pete Seeger’s sister Peggy and was refused admission to the U.S. because of his Leftist politics; virtually all his songs were political but one of the few that wasn’t, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” became an enormous U.S. hit — but for Roberta Flack, not him — and another song, a traditional Russian Gypsy piece called “Gari, Gari”), the songs are sung by Alex Hassilev, who would end up as one-third of the Limelighters, a major folk-comedy nightclub attraction in the early 1960’s.
Joe Smith, American (MGM, 1942)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I watched a movie on TCM called Joe Smith, American, a fascinating little topical “B” from 1942 that was the debut production of Dore Schary’s “B” unit at MGM, though he wasn’t credited with the production (Jack Chertok, who usually headed the unit that produced the Crime Does Not Pay shorts, was) and he didn’t write the script either (that was Allen Rivkin, based on a short story Paul Gallico published in Cosmopolitan back when it was still a prestige publication in the Hearst empire instead of a dating guide for affluent career girls) and was a major success at the box office, doing well enough to rate “A” playing time in some theatres even though it was only 62 minutes long.
The film opens on the shop floor of an airplane factory, then cuts to the offices of the company’s management and shows some of the workers being grilled by the manager and two officials from Washington, D.C. Among these is Joe Smith (Robert Young, surprisingly well cast as a proletarian Everyman instead of the spoiled rich kid he’d played in most of his movies before this), whose answers reveal that he has a wife named Mary (Marsha Hunt), they have a son (Darryl Hickman), they have a home with a mortgage on it from the FHA and a 1938-model car and some money saved up — Joe, who’s taken all the other questions and answered them with surprising patience, bristles when he’s asked how much and refuses to say — and it turns out that the interrogation was to establish Joe’s fitness for a top-secret assignment at the plant he’s under instructions to tell no one, not even his wife, about, which is to install a top-secret bomb sight inside the bombers the plant is building. (The plot gimmick comes from the real-life Norden bombsight that made Allied bombers during World War II considerably more accurate than Axis ones: though its actual design was top secret, its existence was enough of an open secret in pop culture that a number of movies employed it as a plot gimmick, including Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon — though the “bombsight” in that one looked like, and almost certainly was, a photo enlarger, while the brief glimpse we get of it in Joe Smith, American makes it look like a radiator.)
Joe Smith moves to another part of the plant and is set up to start installing bombsights and warned they’re going to keep him overtime; at 8:15 they let him go — and on his way home his car is run off the road by several bad guys (Noel Madison, Don Costello and Joseph Anthony) and he’s blindfolded, taken to a house and routinely beaten so he’ll give the baddies the design of the secret bombsight. The hired thugs behave exactly like the gangsters of the previous decade’s movies — as I’ve noted here before, Hollywood seemed to know only one way to depict evil, so the movie Nazis of the 1940’s acted exactly the way the movie gangsters of the 1930’s had, and the movie Communists of the 1950’s acted that way too — and as they torture Joe (depicted surprisingly graphically by 1942 standards, though compared to what goes on in movies now it looks commendably restrained, with tricks like giving us a P.O.V. shot of the baddies hitting Young and shaking the camera to represent the impact of the blow giving us a much more horrifying idea of what he’s going through than the more graphic approach that would be used today) he tries to keep his mind off the pain by reliving the most pleasant and inspiring moments of his life thus far, including his first date with Mary (she was a blind date set up by two of his factory “buddies”) and the birth of their son. (TCM was showing this film as part of their “Star of the Month” tribute to Ava Gardner, though there seems to be some dispute as to whether she actually appears at all — one imdb.com “trivia” entry says Gardner “is listed in some modern sources as an actress in this movie, but she is not identifiable,” while the imdb.com cast list for the film identifies her role as “secretary” — and I thought she was the nurse in the hospital flashback who comes out and tells Young his son has just been born.)
Anyway, midway through the film the baddies realize that Joe Smith, American will never tell them what they want to know with the meager persuasive devices available to them at that location, so they load him back in the car to take him somewhere else, and Joe determines to remember the details about exactly where they’re going (he’s blindfolded but he still has his other senses and he uses them to figure out the route so he can memorize it and tell it to the authorities later). During the ride he sees his chance and manages to leap out of the moving car, and with a rock on the curb he writes out clues as to where he’s been. An affluent couple drive by and the woman notices Joe Smith’s body; she asks her husband to pull over but he says no way, he’ll let the authorities take care of it — and evidently that happens, because the next shot is of Joe Smith lying in a hospital bed while the authorities question him and his wife tells him he should just let himself go to sleep. He gets into a car with the police and they have a couple of bum steers when Joe’s assumptions about what was going on around him don’t pan out — what he thought was the merry-go-round of a carnival was merely a broadcast of calliope music being played over loudspeakers by a radio store, and what he thought was a line of parked cars turns out to be the rails of a bridge — but eventually he and they find the location of the house where he was held and catch the three gangsters, who are still there in the middle of a card game. Joe recovers and several weeks later is taken to the airplane factory to be thanked by the bosses — and he recognizes the snake ring one of his assailants wore on the finger of company executive Blake McKettrick, thereby realizing (and alerting the authorities) that McKettrick was the head of the gang that had him kidnapped.
Joe Smith, American is full of felicitous touches — like Joe’s son Johnny recounting the story of Nathan Hale to him (thereby setting up the plot device that Joe Smith will have to put his life on the line for his country the way Hale did — though Joe, unlike Hale, lives) and a nice shot of schoolchildren reciting the Pledge of Allegiance 12 years before it was defaced by the words “under God,” a message that’s been communicated to me my whole life that atheists like myself can never be true American citizens. It’s a well-done movie that doesn’t overdo the patriotic sloganeering (like a lot of films made then as wartime morale boosters did) and communicates the message — they also serve who stay at home and build the weapons of war, including safeguarding their secrets, rather than actually fighting in combat — quite effectively and well, and its message of shared sacrifice is one that seems awfully welcome, if just a little quaint, in the era of you’re-on-your-own Tea Party America!
This morning I watched a movie on TCM called Joe Smith, American, a fascinating little topical “B” from 1942 that was the debut production of Dore Schary’s “B” unit at MGM, though he wasn’t credited with the production (Jack Chertok, who usually headed the unit that produced the Crime Does Not Pay shorts, was) and he didn’t write the script either (that was Allen Rivkin, based on a short story Paul Gallico published in Cosmopolitan back when it was still a prestige publication in the Hearst empire instead of a dating guide for affluent career girls) and was a major success at the box office, doing well enough to rate “A” playing time in some theatres even though it was only 62 minutes long.
The film opens on the shop floor of an airplane factory, then cuts to the offices of the company’s management and shows some of the workers being grilled by the manager and two officials from Washington, D.C. Among these is Joe Smith (Robert Young, surprisingly well cast as a proletarian Everyman instead of the spoiled rich kid he’d played in most of his movies before this), whose answers reveal that he has a wife named Mary (Marsha Hunt), they have a son (Darryl Hickman), they have a home with a mortgage on it from the FHA and a 1938-model car and some money saved up — Joe, who’s taken all the other questions and answered them with surprising patience, bristles when he’s asked how much and refuses to say — and it turns out that the interrogation was to establish Joe’s fitness for a top-secret assignment at the plant he’s under instructions to tell no one, not even his wife, about, which is to install a top-secret bomb sight inside the bombers the plant is building. (The plot gimmick comes from the real-life Norden bombsight that made Allied bombers during World War II considerably more accurate than Axis ones: though its actual design was top secret, its existence was enough of an open secret in pop culture that a number of movies employed it as a plot gimmick, including Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon — though the “bombsight” in that one looked like, and almost certainly was, a photo enlarger, while the brief glimpse we get of it in Joe Smith, American makes it look like a radiator.)
Joe Smith moves to another part of the plant and is set up to start installing bombsights and warned they’re going to keep him overtime; at 8:15 they let him go — and on his way home his car is run off the road by several bad guys (Noel Madison, Don Costello and Joseph Anthony) and he’s blindfolded, taken to a house and routinely beaten so he’ll give the baddies the design of the secret bombsight. The hired thugs behave exactly like the gangsters of the previous decade’s movies — as I’ve noted here before, Hollywood seemed to know only one way to depict evil, so the movie Nazis of the 1940’s acted exactly the way the movie gangsters of the 1930’s had, and the movie Communists of the 1950’s acted that way too — and as they torture Joe (depicted surprisingly graphically by 1942 standards, though compared to what goes on in movies now it looks commendably restrained, with tricks like giving us a P.O.V. shot of the baddies hitting Young and shaking the camera to represent the impact of the blow giving us a much more horrifying idea of what he’s going through than the more graphic approach that would be used today) he tries to keep his mind off the pain by reliving the most pleasant and inspiring moments of his life thus far, including his first date with Mary (she was a blind date set up by two of his factory “buddies”) and the birth of their son. (TCM was showing this film as part of their “Star of the Month” tribute to Ava Gardner, though there seems to be some dispute as to whether she actually appears at all — one imdb.com “trivia” entry says Gardner “is listed in some modern sources as an actress in this movie, but she is not identifiable,” while the imdb.com cast list for the film identifies her role as “secretary” — and I thought she was the nurse in the hospital flashback who comes out and tells Young his son has just been born.)
Anyway, midway through the film the baddies realize that Joe Smith, American will never tell them what they want to know with the meager persuasive devices available to them at that location, so they load him back in the car to take him somewhere else, and Joe determines to remember the details about exactly where they’re going (he’s blindfolded but he still has his other senses and he uses them to figure out the route so he can memorize it and tell it to the authorities later). During the ride he sees his chance and manages to leap out of the moving car, and with a rock on the curb he writes out clues as to where he’s been. An affluent couple drive by and the woman notices Joe Smith’s body; she asks her husband to pull over but he says no way, he’ll let the authorities take care of it — and evidently that happens, because the next shot is of Joe Smith lying in a hospital bed while the authorities question him and his wife tells him he should just let himself go to sleep. He gets into a car with the police and they have a couple of bum steers when Joe’s assumptions about what was going on around him don’t pan out — what he thought was the merry-go-round of a carnival was merely a broadcast of calliope music being played over loudspeakers by a radio store, and what he thought was a line of parked cars turns out to be the rails of a bridge — but eventually he and they find the location of the house where he was held and catch the three gangsters, who are still there in the middle of a card game. Joe recovers and several weeks later is taken to the airplane factory to be thanked by the bosses — and he recognizes the snake ring one of his assailants wore on the finger of company executive Blake McKettrick, thereby realizing (and alerting the authorities) that McKettrick was the head of the gang that had him kidnapped.
Joe Smith, American is full of felicitous touches — like Joe’s son Johnny recounting the story of Nathan Hale to him (thereby setting up the plot device that Joe Smith will have to put his life on the line for his country the way Hale did — though Joe, unlike Hale, lives) and a nice shot of schoolchildren reciting the Pledge of Allegiance 12 years before it was defaced by the words “under God,” a message that’s been communicated to me my whole life that atheists like myself can never be true American citizens. It’s a well-done movie that doesn’t overdo the patriotic sloganeering (like a lot of films made then as wartime morale boosters did) and communicates the message — they also serve who stay at home and build the weapons of war, including safeguarding their secrets, rather than actually fighting in combat — quite effectively and well, and its message of shared sacrifice is one that seems awfully welcome, if just a little quaint, in the era of you’re-on-your-own Tea Party America!
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
The Phantom of the Opera (Universal, 1925)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I had providentially brought along a copy of The Phantom of the Opera — the 1925 silent version with Lon Chaney and Mary Philbin, turning in two of the most subtle and nuanced acting jobs in all the silent cinema. The copy I have is in the authentic color tints, and those were quite spectacular (and added to the mood of the film), but all those opening shots of operatic performances in progress are pretty dull without sound — but once Lon Chaney made his entrance the film got decidedly more interesting. It still holds up beautifully, with Chaney’s performance making the Phantom at once despicable and understandable. The fact that this old melodrama has retained its public appeal is a testament to its power. — 3/22/93
=====
Anyway, last night Charles and I went to the Organ Pavilion for a screening of the 1925 classic film The Phantom of the Opera with Jim Riggs providing a live organ accompaniment. The setting could have been a lot better — the showing was interrupted by three incredibly noisy 15-minute tests of the alarm bell at the Japanese Tea Garden (each started at quarter past the hour — 6:15, 7:15 and 8:15 — and ended precisely 15 minutes later, obviously indicating that these were tests being carried out purposely by someone who hadn’t been made aware that there was a major event at the Organ Pavilion with which these tests would interfere) and the first part of the film was mistakenly shown at a 16:9 aspect ratio, which cut Lon Chaney down to James Cagney’s size and likewise shortened and stoutened Mary Philbin, Norman Kerry and the rest of the cast (I and another patron lobbied the young woman who was running the video projection machine — yes, it was projected video, not an actual film print — over the intermission break to change it) — but it was a delight to see the film again even if it seemed a bit of a comedown after our viewing of the Metropolis restoration in the morning.
Before the film screened I had a chance to talk to Jim Riggs, the organist, who said Metropolis was one of his all-time favorite films but he had no idea there was a longer version in circulation that restored at least some of the missing footage. He also mentioned, apropos of the more recent versions of Phantom, that he can’t stand Andrew Lloyd Webber; through clenched teeth he told me, “I hope nobody who comes here tonight is expecting to hear any of that music!,” and he added what he said was his all-time favorite Andrew Lloyd Webber joke: “You go to an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and you leave humming the scenery.”
The 1925 Phantom of the Opera remains unsurpassed and unsurpassable, one of the all-time great silent films even though Rupert Julian’s direction is virtually nonexistent. Fortunately, Universal president Carl Laemmle, put in the middle in the conflicts between Julian and star Lon Chaney, let Chaney basically direct most of his own big scenes (and I suspect Chaney’s hand as director is also apparent in some of the wonderfully Gothic scenes that are very much part of the Phantom’s realm even though he doesn’t actually appear in them — notably the marvelously touching sequence in which Mary Philbin as Christine Daaé, captured by the Phantom, explores the bedroom he has created for her, with its boat-like bed, lavish furnishings and hand mirror already decorated with her name in simple, elegant block letters: CHRISTINE). He also brought in Edward Sedgwick, best known as a comedy director (virtually the only Sedgwick films still shown today are the ones in which he directed Buster Keaton), to do a final chase scene which emerges as a prototype for all the villager scenes in Universal’s horror talkies — though with the intriguing difference that in Phantom the villagers actually kill the monster (they corner him on one of the bridges over the Seine, assault him and then hurl him into the river — “That’s because they weren’t planning to do a sequel!” joked Charles).
Phantom holds up as a great movie even though it’s melodramatic as all get-out (something Charles had found refreshing about Metropolis is that, precisely because the characters were intended as archetypes rather than real people, they did not do the stagy grimacing and hand-over-the-forehead gesturing that often passed for acting in silent films; nor did the story get them in the kinds of outrageous situations that Phantom is full of); it’s the only Phantom adaptation that comes remotely close to Gaston Leroux’ novel (the only one that includes any depiction of the Phantom’s torture chamber at the climax — Leroux lovingly described this and it would seem any remotely conscious filmmaker would have realized its cinematic possibilities, but all the subsequent Phantom films have ignored it!) and it’s by far the best cast — not only Chaney, who gets to play the kind of role he did so well (a realistic monster rather than a supernatural or science-fictional one; as implausible as the plot of Phantom is there’s nothing in it that violates ordinary notions of time, space, life, death or physics in general), but also Mary Philbin, touching and restrained in her rendition of the dilemma facing her character; and the heroes, Norman Kerry as her lover Raoul and Arthur Edwin Carewe as “The Persian,” a mysterious character who turns out to be an agent of the French secret police, are for once convincing in their action sequences (and in Kerry’s case good-looking enough that he’s actually a plausible rival to the Phantom for Christine’s affections).
It’s interesting to note that three of the actors in this film — Kerry, Philbin and Gibson Gowland (as the stagehand at the Opera who leads the lynch mob at the end after the Phantom murders his brother) — were discovered by Erich von Stroheim. And despite the rivalries from other noises in the park and some rather arbitrary choices on his part (like refusing to play any music from Gounod’s Faust even though that is the opera the on-screen characters are shown performing), Jim Riggs accompanied the film superbly (he said he’s played for it many times before, and it showed) with music that projected the story’s doomed romanticism as well as its excitement. — 11/1/02
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On Hallowe’en night Charles and I celebrated by running the 1925 film The Phantom of the Opera, and while none of the adaptations have really done justice to Gaston Leroux’ novel (which I picked up in paperback and read avidly after the success of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical rekindled interest in the story) this remains the best by a considerable margin. Alas, there has never been a concerted effort to restore the 1925 Phantom in the comprehensive fashion attempted by the 2002 and 2010 versions of Metropolis, and so viewers coming to this film either “fresh” or anxious to see the version truest to the filmmakers’ original intentions are going to have a real problem.
The problems with Phantom from a textual point of view actually started when the film was new: Universal assigned Lon Chaney to the title role (using up their last outstanding commitment to him; Chaney had signed with the Goldwyn company in 1922 while he still owed Universal two films under a previous contract, commitments Universal used to make the 1923 Hunchback of Notre-Dame and the 1925 Phantom; in between Hunchback and Phantom Goldwyn merged with Metro and Mayer to form MGM and Chaney made all his subsequent films for MGM, though he was scheduled to return to Universal, along with his favorite director Tod Browning, to make Dracula when he died of throat cancer in 1930) and Mary Philbin and Norman Kerry, the star team of Erich von Stroheim’s World War I melodrama The Merry-Go-Round, to play the ingénues. (Kerry had previously worked with Chaney on the 1923 Hunchback.)
As a director they hired Rupert Julian, described by horror-film historian Carlos Clarens as having all Stroheim’s affectations but none of his talents, mainly (apparently) because Julian had replaced Stroheim on The Merry-Go-Round and seemed to have got along with Kerry and Philbin. Scenarists Elliot Clawson and Raymond Schrock (along with several other uncredited writers) squeezed a script out of Leroux’ 1911 novel that pretty closely followed it (certainly more so than any of the subsequent film versions or the Lloyd Webber musical) and Julian antagonized so many of the people associated with the film that at one point Kerry threatened to punch him out and Chaney took over the direction of most of his own scenes. (They indicate that had Chaney lived to direct an entire movie, he would have been quite good at it: the famous scene in which the heroine unmasks the Phantom and reveals the skull-like face underneath is a masterpiece of angling and cutting and is far more imaginative than anything in the movie that can definitely be attributed to Julian.)
Some “trivia” posters on imdb.com claim that Julian was fired from the film before it was even finished, but earlier sources (including Michael Druxman’s book on much-remade movies, Make It Again, Sam) suggest that he did do a director’s cut, it was previewed — and audiences were bored by the ending, in which the Phantom died in his subterranean lake under the Paris Opera House. So Universal hired yet another director, Edward Sedgwick, to film the ending the film has now, in which the Phantom is chased outside the opera house and ultimately drowns to death in the Seine River. Sedgwick was best known as a comedy director — he made most of Buster Keaton’s MGM films from 1928 to 1933 — but perhaps Universal thought he would do well with this assignment because most silent comedies turned, sooner or later, into chases and therefore chases were something they knew he would do. (Still, the ending has always seemed to me to be a major letdown compared to the rest of the film.)
The New York Times review in 1925 called it “a well-dressed thriller, with a capable acting by the villain, a stiff and stilted hero and an insipid heroine. So far as the story is concerned, it looks as if too many cooks had rather spoiled the broth, which was served up in novel form by Gaston Leroux.” The original 1925 release also contained a two-strip Technicolor sequence in which Chaney appears at the opera’s Bal Masque ball dressed as the Red Death from Edgar Allan Poe’s story of that name — it’s the only color footage of Chaney extant, though the heavy mask and cape he’s wearing hides his figures even more than most of his movie get-ups do — and oddly it cuts from Technicolor during the scenes taking place inside the opera house to stencil color when Chaney appears in his Red Death get-up on the roof of the opera house and spies on his protégée, Christine Daaé (Mary Philbin), and Raoul de Chagny (Norman Kerry), the lover the Phantom is insisting she break up with to devote herself entirely to him and her career, then back to Technicolor when the scene cuts back to the Opera House interior. The Opera House interior, by the way, still stands on Stage 28 on the Universal lot, though years of neglect have sent it into a state of disrepair and now it’s hardly ever used; for years, however, Universal employed it to represent any large theatre they needed for a film, and occasionally even other companies sent units to Universal to film on it (Irene Dunne’s last concert in the 1934 RKO film Stingaree was shot on the Opera House set from Phantom).
The Phantom of the Opera was an enormous hit, and in 1929 Universal reissued it, still as a silent but with a synchronized music and effects track added. Unfortunately, the 1929 reissue was about 20 minutes shorter than the 1925 release (major surgery like that was easier to do in the silent era because one could cut a film to one’s heart’s content without worrying about any audible gaps or rough edits in a soundtrack) — though to make it even more confusing, a few added scenes were filmed by director Ernst Laemmle, a relative of Universal’s founder and owner Carl Laemmle — and that was used as the basis for yet another reissue in 1930. This time dialogue was dubbed in; Universal reunited the members of the original cast, except for Chaney — though it’s unclear whether Chaney was already dead by then or was still alive but unavailable to dub his part because he was still under exclusive contract to MGM. Though the ads for the 1930 dialogue version said, “Everybody Talks but the Phantom,” apparently there are a few snatches of what’s supposed to be the Phantom’s voice, added by actor Phillips Smalley.
The film survived in various bits and pieces and fragmentary versions, ultimately achieving legendary status at least in part because it leached into the public domain and was by the 1960’s and 1970’s probably the most readily accessible of Chaney’s films. It also got remade twice, in 1943 with Claude Rains and Nelson Eddy, and in 1962 in England with Herbert Lom, but with a more heroic origin story for the Phantom: in the novel he’s a freak who taught himself music while working in carnivals, got hired on the crew that built the Paris Opera in the first place and built his own subterranean lair in the evenings while working as a normal construction worker during the day; in Chaney’s film he’s a criminally insane escapee from Devil’s Island who hid out under the Opera House; in the subsequent versions he was a former Opera musician, disfigured in an accident, helping Christine become an opera star for beneficent instead of romantically obsessed reasons.
The version we had access to was a two-DVD set from Image Entertainment, part of the Milestone Film and Video collection, which was billed as “the ultimate edition” but really wasn’t: disc one was a full-scale restoration, produced in 1999 for Channel Four TV in Britain, and including authentic tints and the Bal Masque sequence in color, but based on the shorter 1929 version. It also offered a choice of scores between a new one composed and recorded by Carl Davis and one assembled from the surviving soundtrack recordings from 1929 and 1930 — though, to make it even more confusing, one of the special features on the DVD was advertised as “selections of dialogue sequences from the 1930 version not found in the restored version.” Disc two was advertised as the original 1925 release, and so it was textually — but it was totally unrestored, in scratchy black-and-white, and the only accompaniment was an organ score by Jon Mirsalis.
We watched the 1929 restored version with the Carl Davis score, and it remains a stunning movie — though it does rather peter out towards the ending — visually imaginative, full of marvelously Gothic touches (like the long scarf Mary Philbin is wearing, which trails in the water as the boat by which the Phantom is taking her to his underground lair traverses the underground streams leading to it) and refreshingly understated in the acting. Chaney is unsurpassable as the Phantom — not only as actor but as makeup artist as well; he designed and applied his own makeup, including sticking wires around his eyes and up his nose to give his face the skeleton-like features he wanted. (This was the makeup that inspired someone to ask Chaney why he put himself through so much pain for the sake of his movies — to which he replied, “Unless I suffer, how can I get the audience to believe me?”) And his performance is seconded by Philbin, who despite a rather bothersome expression in some scenes that seems designed to convey winsomeness but comes off more as a smirk, is quite delicate and economical in her gestures, especially in the sequence — anticipating Rebecca by 15 years and conveying much the same sort of emotional discomfort — in which she’s borne to the Phantom’s bedchamber for her, complete with a boat-shaped bed and a hand mirror already emblazoned with her name, “Christine.” (This scene seemed photographically inferior to the rest of the film — as if the restorers hadn’t been able to find as good a source for it as they had for the remainder.)
Phantom deserves its classic status even though much of the cinematic potential of Leroux’ novel remains unrealized despite the multiple filmizations; at least this one contains one of the torture rooms the Phantom rigs up to entrap any unwelcome people who try to visit him; Raoul and Inspector Ledoux of the Surété (played by Arthur Edmund Carewe — the character is called “The Persian” in the novel and isn’t an official police officer but an informant anxious to work with the police to trap the Phantom because the Phantom previously was responsible for the death of one of his relatives; the sole concession to his original identity in the movie is the fez he otherwise inexplicably wears) get trapped in a room lined with mirrors that quickly fills up with intolerable heat. (In the book there’s a whole series of these torture chambers, all illusions the Phantom literally creates with mirrors. None of the subsequent filmmakers who’ve tackled this story have done any of the chambers, even though they seem like marvelously cinematic material.)
The new score by Carl Davis wisely supplies themes from Gounod’s Faust, the opera the company is performing, whenever scenes actually showing opera performances appear, and is generally appropriate and well recorded — but frankly if I were supervising a two-DVD edition of this movie I would have put the original 1925 version on one disc, including the color sequence and tints and restored to the best possible photographic quality, while on the other disc I would have included as much as possible of the 1930 sound version, filled in with gaps from the 1929 synchronization in cases where some of the dialogue was missing. That would have deserved the “ultimate edition” title! — 11/2/10
I had providentially brought along a copy of The Phantom of the Opera — the 1925 silent version with Lon Chaney and Mary Philbin, turning in two of the most subtle and nuanced acting jobs in all the silent cinema. The copy I have is in the authentic color tints, and those were quite spectacular (and added to the mood of the film), but all those opening shots of operatic performances in progress are pretty dull without sound — but once Lon Chaney made his entrance the film got decidedly more interesting. It still holds up beautifully, with Chaney’s performance making the Phantom at once despicable and understandable. The fact that this old melodrama has retained its public appeal is a testament to its power. — 3/22/93
=====
Anyway, last night Charles and I went to the Organ Pavilion for a screening of the 1925 classic film The Phantom of the Opera with Jim Riggs providing a live organ accompaniment. The setting could have been a lot better — the showing was interrupted by three incredibly noisy 15-minute tests of the alarm bell at the Japanese Tea Garden (each started at quarter past the hour — 6:15, 7:15 and 8:15 — and ended precisely 15 minutes later, obviously indicating that these were tests being carried out purposely by someone who hadn’t been made aware that there was a major event at the Organ Pavilion with which these tests would interfere) and the first part of the film was mistakenly shown at a 16:9 aspect ratio, which cut Lon Chaney down to James Cagney’s size and likewise shortened and stoutened Mary Philbin, Norman Kerry and the rest of the cast (I and another patron lobbied the young woman who was running the video projection machine — yes, it was projected video, not an actual film print — over the intermission break to change it) — but it was a delight to see the film again even if it seemed a bit of a comedown after our viewing of the Metropolis restoration in the morning.
Before the film screened I had a chance to talk to Jim Riggs, the organist, who said Metropolis was one of his all-time favorite films but he had no idea there was a longer version in circulation that restored at least some of the missing footage. He also mentioned, apropos of the more recent versions of Phantom, that he can’t stand Andrew Lloyd Webber; through clenched teeth he told me, “I hope nobody who comes here tonight is expecting to hear any of that music!,” and he added what he said was his all-time favorite Andrew Lloyd Webber joke: “You go to an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and you leave humming the scenery.”
The 1925 Phantom of the Opera remains unsurpassed and unsurpassable, one of the all-time great silent films even though Rupert Julian’s direction is virtually nonexistent. Fortunately, Universal president Carl Laemmle, put in the middle in the conflicts between Julian and star Lon Chaney, let Chaney basically direct most of his own big scenes (and I suspect Chaney’s hand as director is also apparent in some of the wonderfully Gothic scenes that are very much part of the Phantom’s realm even though he doesn’t actually appear in them — notably the marvelously touching sequence in which Mary Philbin as Christine Daaé, captured by the Phantom, explores the bedroom he has created for her, with its boat-like bed, lavish furnishings and hand mirror already decorated with her name in simple, elegant block letters: CHRISTINE). He also brought in Edward Sedgwick, best known as a comedy director (virtually the only Sedgwick films still shown today are the ones in which he directed Buster Keaton), to do a final chase scene which emerges as a prototype for all the villager scenes in Universal’s horror talkies — though with the intriguing difference that in Phantom the villagers actually kill the monster (they corner him on one of the bridges over the Seine, assault him and then hurl him into the river — “That’s because they weren’t planning to do a sequel!” joked Charles).
Phantom holds up as a great movie even though it’s melodramatic as all get-out (something Charles had found refreshing about Metropolis is that, precisely because the characters were intended as archetypes rather than real people, they did not do the stagy grimacing and hand-over-the-forehead gesturing that often passed for acting in silent films; nor did the story get them in the kinds of outrageous situations that Phantom is full of); it’s the only Phantom adaptation that comes remotely close to Gaston Leroux’ novel (the only one that includes any depiction of the Phantom’s torture chamber at the climax — Leroux lovingly described this and it would seem any remotely conscious filmmaker would have realized its cinematic possibilities, but all the subsequent Phantom films have ignored it!) and it’s by far the best cast — not only Chaney, who gets to play the kind of role he did so well (a realistic monster rather than a supernatural or science-fictional one; as implausible as the plot of Phantom is there’s nothing in it that violates ordinary notions of time, space, life, death or physics in general), but also Mary Philbin, touching and restrained in her rendition of the dilemma facing her character; and the heroes, Norman Kerry as her lover Raoul and Arthur Edwin Carewe as “The Persian,” a mysterious character who turns out to be an agent of the French secret police, are for once convincing in their action sequences (and in Kerry’s case good-looking enough that he’s actually a plausible rival to the Phantom for Christine’s affections).
It’s interesting to note that three of the actors in this film — Kerry, Philbin and Gibson Gowland (as the stagehand at the Opera who leads the lynch mob at the end after the Phantom murders his brother) — were discovered by Erich von Stroheim. And despite the rivalries from other noises in the park and some rather arbitrary choices on his part (like refusing to play any music from Gounod’s Faust even though that is the opera the on-screen characters are shown performing), Jim Riggs accompanied the film superbly (he said he’s played for it many times before, and it showed) with music that projected the story’s doomed romanticism as well as its excitement. — 11/1/02
=====
On Hallowe’en night Charles and I celebrated by running the 1925 film The Phantom of the Opera, and while none of the adaptations have really done justice to Gaston Leroux’ novel (which I picked up in paperback and read avidly after the success of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical rekindled interest in the story) this remains the best by a considerable margin. Alas, there has never been a concerted effort to restore the 1925 Phantom in the comprehensive fashion attempted by the 2002 and 2010 versions of Metropolis, and so viewers coming to this film either “fresh” or anxious to see the version truest to the filmmakers’ original intentions are going to have a real problem.
The problems with Phantom from a textual point of view actually started when the film was new: Universal assigned Lon Chaney to the title role (using up their last outstanding commitment to him; Chaney had signed with the Goldwyn company in 1922 while he still owed Universal two films under a previous contract, commitments Universal used to make the 1923 Hunchback of Notre-Dame and the 1925 Phantom; in between Hunchback and Phantom Goldwyn merged with Metro and Mayer to form MGM and Chaney made all his subsequent films for MGM, though he was scheduled to return to Universal, along with his favorite director Tod Browning, to make Dracula when he died of throat cancer in 1930) and Mary Philbin and Norman Kerry, the star team of Erich von Stroheim’s World War I melodrama The Merry-Go-Round, to play the ingénues. (Kerry had previously worked with Chaney on the 1923 Hunchback.)
As a director they hired Rupert Julian, described by horror-film historian Carlos Clarens as having all Stroheim’s affectations but none of his talents, mainly (apparently) because Julian had replaced Stroheim on The Merry-Go-Round and seemed to have got along with Kerry and Philbin. Scenarists Elliot Clawson and Raymond Schrock (along with several other uncredited writers) squeezed a script out of Leroux’ 1911 novel that pretty closely followed it (certainly more so than any of the subsequent film versions or the Lloyd Webber musical) and Julian antagonized so many of the people associated with the film that at one point Kerry threatened to punch him out and Chaney took over the direction of most of his own scenes. (They indicate that had Chaney lived to direct an entire movie, he would have been quite good at it: the famous scene in which the heroine unmasks the Phantom and reveals the skull-like face underneath is a masterpiece of angling and cutting and is far more imaginative than anything in the movie that can definitely be attributed to Julian.)
Some “trivia” posters on imdb.com claim that Julian was fired from the film before it was even finished, but earlier sources (including Michael Druxman’s book on much-remade movies, Make It Again, Sam) suggest that he did do a director’s cut, it was previewed — and audiences were bored by the ending, in which the Phantom died in his subterranean lake under the Paris Opera House. So Universal hired yet another director, Edward Sedgwick, to film the ending the film has now, in which the Phantom is chased outside the opera house and ultimately drowns to death in the Seine River. Sedgwick was best known as a comedy director — he made most of Buster Keaton’s MGM films from 1928 to 1933 — but perhaps Universal thought he would do well with this assignment because most silent comedies turned, sooner or later, into chases and therefore chases were something they knew he would do. (Still, the ending has always seemed to me to be a major letdown compared to the rest of the film.)
The New York Times review in 1925 called it “a well-dressed thriller, with a capable acting by the villain, a stiff and stilted hero and an insipid heroine. So far as the story is concerned, it looks as if too many cooks had rather spoiled the broth, which was served up in novel form by Gaston Leroux.” The original 1925 release also contained a two-strip Technicolor sequence in which Chaney appears at the opera’s Bal Masque ball dressed as the Red Death from Edgar Allan Poe’s story of that name — it’s the only color footage of Chaney extant, though the heavy mask and cape he’s wearing hides his figures even more than most of his movie get-ups do — and oddly it cuts from Technicolor during the scenes taking place inside the opera house to stencil color when Chaney appears in his Red Death get-up on the roof of the opera house and spies on his protégée, Christine Daaé (Mary Philbin), and Raoul de Chagny (Norman Kerry), the lover the Phantom is insisting she break up with to devote herself entirely to him and her career, then back to Technicolor when the scene cuts back to the Opera House interior. The Opera House interior, by the way, still stands on Stage 28 on the Universal lot, though years of neglect have sent it into a state of disrepair and now it’s hardly ever used; for years, however, Universal employed it to represent any large theatre they needed for a film, and occasionally even other companies sent units to Universal to film on it (Irene Dunne’s last concert in the 1934 RKO film Stingaree was shot on the Opera House set from Phantom).
The Phantom of the Opera was an enormous hit, and in 1929 Universal reissued it, still as a silent but with a synchronized music and effects track added. Unfortunately, the 1929 reissue was about 20 minutes shorter than the 1925 release (major surgery like that was easier to do in the silent era because one could cut a film to one’s heart’s content without worrying about any audible gaps or rough edits in a soundtrack) — though to make it even more confusing, a few added scenes were filmed by director Ernst Laemmle, a relative of Universal’s founder and owner Carl Laemmle — and that was used as the basis for yet another reissue in 1930. This time dialogue was dubbed in; Universal reunited the members of the original cast, except for Chaney — though it’s unclear whether Chaney was already dead by then or was still alive but unavailable to dub his part because he was still under exclusive contract to MGM. Though the ads for the 1930 dialogue version said, “Everybody Talks but the Phantom,” apparently there are a few snatches of what’s supposed to be the Phantom’s voice, added by actor Phillips Smalley.
The film survived in various bits and pieces and fragmentary versions, ultimately achieving legendary status at least in part because it leached into the public domain and was by the 1960’s and 1970’s probably the most readily accessible of Chaney’s films. It also got remade twice, in 1943 with Claude Rains and Nelson Eddy, and in 1962 in England with Herbert Lom, but with a more heroic origin story for the Phantom: in the novel he’s a freak who taught himself music while working in carnivals, got hired on the crew that built the Paris Opera in the first place and built his own subterranean lair in the evenings while working as a normal construction worker during the day; in Chaney’s film he’s a criminally insane escapee from Devil’s Island who hid out under the Opera House; in the subsequent versions he was a former Opera musician, disfigured in an accident, helping Christine become an opera star for beneficent instead of romantically obsessed reasons.
The version we had access to was a two-DVD set from Image Entertainment, part of the Milestone Film and Video collection, which was billed as “the ultimate edition” but really wasn’t: disc one was a full-scale restoration, produced in 1999 for Channel Four TV in Britain, and including authentic tints and the Bal Masque sequence in color, but based on the shorter 1929 version. It also offered a choice of scores between a new one composed and recorded by Carl Davis and one assembled from the surviving soundtrack recordings from 1929 and 1930 — though, to make it even more confusing, one of the special features on the DVD was advertised as “selections of dialogue sequences from the 1930 version not found in the restored version.” Disc two was advertised as the original 1925 release, and so it was textually — but it was totally unrestored, in scratchy black-and-white, and the only accompaniment was an organ score by Jon Mirsalis.
We watched the 1929 restored version with the Carl Davis score, and it remains a stunning movie — though it does rather peter out towards the ending — visually imaginative, full of marvelously Gothic touches (like the long scarf Mary Philbin is wearing, which trails in the water as the boat by which the Phantom is taking her to his underground lair traverses the underground streams leading to it) and refreshingly understated in the acting. Chaney is unsurpassable as the Phantom — not only as actor but as makeup artist as well; he designed and applied his own makeup, including sticking wires around his eyes and up his nose to give his face the skeleton-like features he wanted. (This was the makeup that inspired someone to ask Chaney why he put himself through so much pain for the sake of his movies — to which he replied, “Unless I suffer, how can I get the audience to believe me?”) And his performance is seconded by Philbin, who despite a rather bothersome expression in some scenes that seems designed to convey winsomeness but comes off more as a smirk, is quite delicate and economical in her gestures, especially in the sequence — anticipating Rebecca by 15 years and conveying much the same sort of emotional discomfort — in which she’s borne to the Phantom’s bedchamber for her, complete with a boat-shaped bed and a hand mirror already emblazoned with her name, “Christine.” (This scene seemed photographically inferior to the rest of the film — as if the restorers hadn’t been able to find as good a source for it as they had for the remainder.)
Phantom deserves its classic status even though much of the cinematic potential of Leroux’ novel remains unrealized despite the multiple filmizations; at least this one contains one of the torture rooms the Phantom rigs up to entrap any unwelcome people who try to visit him; Raoul and Inspector Ledoux of the Surété (played by Arthur Edmund Carewe — the character is called “The Persian” in the novel and isn’t an official police officer but an informant anxious to work with the police to trap the Phantom because the Phantom previously was responsible for the death of one of his relatives; the sole concession to his original identity in the movie is the fez he otherwise inexplicably wears) get trapped in a room lined with mirrors that quickly fills up with intolerable heat. (In the book there’s a whole series of these torture chambers, all illusions the Phantom literally creates with mirrors. None of the subsequent filmmakers who’ve tackled this story have done any of the chambers, even though they seem like marvelously cinematic material.)
The new score by Carl Davis wisely supplies themes from Gounod’s Faust, the opera the company is performing, whenever scenes actually showing opera performances appear, and is generally appropriate and well recorded — but frankly if I were supervising a two-DVD edition of this movie I would have put the original 1925 version on one disc, including the color sequence and tints and restored to the best possible photographic quality, while on the other disc I would have included as much as possible of the 1930 sound version, filled in with gaps from the 1929 synchronization in cases where some of the dialogue was missing. That would have deserved the “ultimate edition” title! — 11/2/10
The Velvet Touch (Independent Artists/RKO, 1948)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film Charles and I watched last night was The Velvet Touch, a 1948 vehicle for Rosalind Russell that was the third film under a three-picture contract she had signed with RKO. The first two films she made for them had been serious, high-minded projects — Sister Kenny (1946), a favorite of mine because it’s one of the most savage and cogent attacks on medical orthodoxy ever produced by a Hollywood studio; and a three-hour plus adaptation of Mourning Becomes Electra, Eugene O’Neill’s famous play, made in 1947 and, like Sister Kenny, directed by former screenwriter Dudley Nichols. (Russell wanted to get Greta Garbo out of retirement to play her mother in Mourning Becomes Electra, but when Garbo said no she and Nichols ended up hiring Katina Paxinou, even though the age difference between them was only three years.)
Both Sister Kenny and Mourning Becomes Electra were major box-office bombs, and so for the third film Russell owed RKO she and her husband, Frederick Brisson (son of Danish entertainer Carl Brisson, who starred in the 1934 “pre-Code” musical Murder at the Vanities), decided to reach for a sure-fire property and make a sleazy film that would be a box-office smash and restore her star standing. What they came up was a wild melodrama that quite frankly would have been better suited for Bette Davis or Joan Crawford: four writers — William Mercer and Annabel Ross, story; Walter Reilly, adaptation; and Leo Rosten (the only one of these writers I’d otherwise heard of), script — concocted a story in which Russell was cast as Valerie Stanton, Broadway stage star whose career has been directed to the heights by her combination producer and lover, Gordon Dunning (Leon Ames, in a surprisingly sleazy performance for someone best known as the all-wise father of Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis and Doris Day in On Moonlight Bay), who has given her a series of comedies with fluffy titles like “It’s a Gay Life” and “Scandalous.”
Valerie is losing interest in Dunning both as career mentor and romantic partner: she wants to replace him in the former role with Peter Gunther (Walter Kingsford), who wants her to star in his new production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler; and in the latter role with Michael Morrell (a role that cried out for Cary Grant and got Leo Genn, who though a fine actor simply isn’t charismatic enough to be credible as the man no woman can resist). After the final performance of her latest production, she and Dunning have a confrontation in his office in the theatre building, and he insists that he’s not going to let her go as either lover or star; he grabs her and she reaches behind him, grabs an award he won for best director in 1940, and clubs him with it. The film begins with her clubbing Dunning, presumably to death (I say “presumably” because for a while I thought the writers were leaving open the possibility that her blow had merely rendered him unconscious, and someone else had sneaked in later and finished him off, but no-o-o-o-o: it soon develops that we’re supposed to understand that she did indeed kill him), then flashes back and spends about half its 101-minute running time giving us all this as backstory before it returns to the present tense about midway through with the welcome appearance of Sydney Greenstreet as Captain Danbury of the New York Police Department, whose cool professionalism dominates the second half of the movie over the relentless overacting of the rest of the cast.
Danbury soon decides that Dunning was killed not by Valerie but by Marian Webster (a surprisingly homely-looking Claire Trevor), her rival both professionally and for Dunning’s affections — indeed, during the flashback we find that Valerie tried to get Dunning and Marian back together so he’d leave her alone and let her marry Michael, but all that resulted was a nasty and very public argument between Dunning and Marian in Sardi’s restaurant that Danbury learns about and is thereby convinced that Marian had a motive to kill Dunning — and Marian ultimately commits suicide, which convinces Danbury that she was guilty and he can close the case. Only Valerie finds herself driven crazy by her own guilty conscience as she rehearses Hedda Gabler, and the writers and no-name director John Gage spend about half an hour leading us to believe that on opening night Valerie will substitute a genuine, loaded pistol for the prop gun with which she is supposed to commit suicide at the end of the play and off herself for real — only in the end she doesn’t: she leaves Danbury a note with her confession on it (written, natch, on a page torn out of a program for the play) and survives long enough to take her curtain call before he takes her in at the end.
The Velvet Touch is total nonsense as a story, and as a vehicle for Russell it leaves a lot to be desired — we don’t know whether she survives at the end out of a Production Code decree or because as a ham actress she wasn’t going to off herself before having a chance to take a curtain call — we want to see Russell over the top in a comedy context, as Auntie Mame or Mama Rose, but not in this sort of heavy-breathing melodrama Davis or Crawford could have done better. There does seem to be a certain autobiographical aspect in this movie — after she’d made two High Dramas which had been box-office flops Russell may have been feeling as trapped by audience expectations as Valerie is in the story, burning for a chance to play drama while her public made it clear they wanted to see her in comedy — and as effective co-producer (Mr. Brisson gets sole credit but I’m sure he and Mrs. Brisson collaborated in a lot of their decisions about this production!) as well as star she seems to want to have it both ways, including enough scenes from Hedda Gabler to show she could act in a classic drama (the closing credits have a separate title card for the onscreen cast of the play-within-the-film, with Russell the only actor who’s in both the Gabler sequences and the overall movie) even though the early scenes of her acting in one of Dunning’s comedies are by far the ones in which she seems the most comfortable and appealing. Still, The Velvet Touch is a fun picture in a dumb way, and it made tons of money for the Brissons and for RKO, thereby accomplishing its purpose of rehabilitating its star’s career.
The film Charles and I watched last night was The Velvet Touch, a 1948 vehicle for Rosalind Russell that was the third film under a three-picture contract she had signed with RKO. The first two films she made for them had been serious, high-minded projects — Sister Kenny (1946), a favorite of mine because it’s one of the most savage and cogent attacks on medical orthodoxy ever produced by a Hollywood studio; and a three-hour plus adaptation of Mourning Becomes Electra, Eugene O’Neill’s famous play, made in 1947 and, like Sister Kenny, directed by former screenwriter Dudley Nichols. (Russell wanted to get Greta Garbo out of retirement to play her mother in Mourning Becomes Electra, but when Garbo said no she and Nichols ended up hiring Katina Paxinou, even though the age difference between them was only three years.)
Both Sister Kenny and Mourning Becomes Electra were major box-office bombs, and so for the third film Russell owed RKO she and her husband, Frederick Brisson (son of Danish entertainer Carl Brisson, who starred in the 1934 “pre-Code” musical Murder at the Vanities), decided to reach for a sure-fire property and make a sleazy film that would be a box-office smash and restore her star standing. What they came up was a wild melodrama that quite frankly would have been better suited for Bette Davis or Joan Crawford: four writers — William Mercer and Annabel Ross, story; Walter Reilly, adaptation; and Leo Rosten (the only one of these writers I’d otherwise heard of), script — concocted a story in which Russell was cast as Valerie Stanton, Broadway stage star whose career has been directed to the heights by her combination producer and lover, Gordon Dunning (Leon Ames, in a surprisingly sleazy performance for someone best known as the all-wise father of Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis and Doris Day in On Moonlight Bay), who has given her a series of comedies with fluffy titles like “It’s a Gay Life” and “Scandalous.”
Valerie is losing interest in Dunning both as career mentor and romantic partner: she wants to replace him in the former role with Peter Gunther (Walter Kingsford), who wants her to star in his new production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler; and in the latter role with Michael Morrell (a role that cried out for Cary Grant and got Leo Genn, who though a fine actor simply isn’t charismatic enough to be credible as the man no woman can resist). After the final performance of her latest production, she and Dunning have a confrontation in his office in the theatre building, and he insists that he’s not going to let her go as either lover or star; he grabs her and she reaches behind him, grabs an award he won for best director in 1940, and clubs him with it. The film begins with her clubbing Dunning, presumably to death (I say “presumably” because for a while I thought the writers were leaving open the possibility that her blow had merely rendered him unconscious, and someone else had sneaked in later and finished him off, but no-o-o-o-o: it soon develops that we’re supposed to understand that she did indeed kill him), then flashes back and spends about half its 101-minute running time giving us all this as backstory before it returns to the present tense about midway through with the welcome appearance of Sydney Greenstreet as Captain Danbury of the New York Police Department, whose cool professionalism dominates the second half of the movie over the relentless overacting of the rest of the cast.
Danbury soon decides that Dunning was killed not by Valerie but by Marian Webster (a surprisingly homely-looking Claire Trevor), her rival both professionally and for Dunning’s affections — indeed, during the flashback we find that Valerie tried to get Dunning and Marian back together so he’d leave her alone and let her marry Michael, but all that resulted was a nasty and very public argument between Dunning and Marian in Sardi’s restaurant that Danbury learns about and is thereby convinced that Marian had a motive to kill Dunning — and Marian ultimately commits suicide, which convinces Danbury that she was guilty and he can close the case. Only Valerie finds herself driven crazy by her own guilty conscience as she rehearses Hedda Gabler, and the writers and no-name director John Gage spend about half an hour leading us to believe that on opening night Valerie will substitute a genuine, loaded pistol for the prop gun with which she is supposed to commit suicide at the end of the play and off herself for real — only in the end she doesn’t: she leaves Danbury a note with her confession on it (written, natch, on a page torn out of a program for the play) and survives long enough to take her curtain call before he takes her in at the end.
The Velvet Touch is total nonsense as a story, and as a vehicle for Russell it leaves a lot to be desired — we don’t know whether she survives at the end out of a Production Code decree or because as a ham actress she wasn’t going to off herself before having a chance to take a curtain call — we want to see Russell over the top in a comedy context, as Auntie Mame or Mama Rose, but not in this sort of heavy-breathing melodrama Davis or Crawford could have done better. There does seem to be a certain autobiographical aspect in this movie — after she’d made two High Dramas which had been box-office flops Russell may have been feeling as trapped by audience expectations as Valerie is in the story, burning for a chance to play drama while her public made it clear they wanted to see her in comedy — and as effective co-producer (Mr. Brisson gets sole credit but I’m sure he and Mrs. Brisson collaborated in a lot of their decisions about this production!) as well as star she seems to want to have it both ways, including enough scenes from Hedda Gabler to show she could act in a classic drama (the closing credits have a separate title card for the onscreen cast of the play-within-the-film, with Russell the only actor who’s in both the Gabler sequences and the overall movie) even though the early scenes of her acting in one of Dunning’s comedies are by far the ones in which she seems the most comfortable and appealing. Still, The Velvet Touch is a fun picture in a dumb way, and it made tons of money for the Brissons and for RKO, thereby accomplishing its purpose of rehabilitating its star’s career.
Monday, November 1, 2010
House of Wax (Warner Bros., 1953)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I’m more familiar with the original version of House of Wax, the 1933 Mystery of the Wax Museum, even though that version was thought lost until 1970 (when a copy turned up in Jack Warner’s private collection) and the later version is far more widely shown, since it was the first major-studio production released in 3-D (Arch Oboler’s independently-made Bwana Devil had preceded it) and it was the movie that “typed” its star, Vincent Price, as a horror actor instead of the lounge-lizard supporting player he’d been in Laura and most of his previous movies. House of Wax is actually a pretty dull movie, especially seen “flat.”
The earlier Mystery of the Wax Museum is a far better film, with faster-paced direction by Michael Curtiz (although House of Wax director André de Toth — it’s so like Jack Warner to have assigned his first 3-D production to a director who had only one eye and therefore could not watch his own movie in 3-D — did get a few effectively noir-ish compositions into his movie, notably in the scene in which Phyllis Kirk enters the room of her roommate, who we know has been murdered but she does not), a more incisive “star” performance by Lionel Atwill (he acts the part of the mad monster artist with real conviction and panache, whereas Price seems to be “phoning it in” through much of the film) and far better casting of the female roles.
Fay Wray’s casting as the woman in distress in the original is probably predictable, but at least she portrays the role as a credible human being — Kirk speaks all her lines in a dead monotone that suggests a casting-couch hire on her first day in acting class. And the elimination of the reporter character played by Glenda Farrell in the original really hurts the film, not only in making it considerably more plodding (the use of the reporter enables the “mystery of the wax museum” to be solved far more quickly and incisively in the earlier version) but also in depriving it of the energy the original film gained from her rapid-fire performance. The best moments in House of Wax are the ones taken most directly from the original movie: the burning of the original wax museum at the beginning and the near-incineration of the heroine under a spray of molten wax at the end — both with so many setups and cuts taken almost directly from the original movie that it’s hard to believe de Toth hadn’t seen the original when he made this one! — 6/24/95
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I ran Charles the 1953 House of Wax as a follow-up to seeing the original version, Mystery of the Wax Museum, the night before. My impression that the original was much the better movie was only confirmed this time around — though had the video offered the film in its original 3-D format (if a reissue label like Rhino could do that for Cat Women of the Moon and the 1961 Mask, certainly Warner Home Video could have offered a 3-D print and two pair of glasses with every copy of this DVD!) the difference might have been a little narrower, In 3-D the famous paddle-ball sequence (staged by a performer playing a carnival barker Vincent Price, in the role played by Lionel Atwill in Mystery, has hired to drum up interest in his museum, which is actually called “House of Wax”!) is absolutely stunning; in 2-D it just looks gratuitous and a bit silly.
Crane Wilbur’s rehash of the original Carl Erickson-Don Mullaly screenplay (they don’t get credit on the remake but Charles Belden, who wrote the original story, does) moves the film back from a contemporary setting to the first years of the 20th century, changes all the character names (though “Igor,” now pronounced “EE-gor” instead of the first version’s “EYE-gor,” is no longer the name of the mad sculptor but his mute assistant — and that, not the addict sidekick, is the role Charles Bronson played under his birth last name, Buchinsky) and, most damagingly, eliminates the Glenda Farrell reporter character altogether. Instead the damsel in distress, Phyllis Kirk (who as a version of ethereal loveliness hardly competes with Fay Wray!), unravels the mystery herself after the murder of her roommate (Carolyn Jones, who unlike Monica Bannister in the original, actually does get to appear on screen as a live person before being waxified and put on exhibit as Joan of Arc).
House of Wax launched Vincent Price on his career as a horror star; he’d worked in the genre before but this was the film that “typed” him the way Frankenstein “typed” Boris Karloff — though at this juncture it’s hard to see why; while Karloff, Lugosi and Atwill took their horror parts seriously Price, even this early, camped his way through his, turning in an entertaining but superficial performance here whereas Atwill in Mystery had achieved real pathos and even a certain level of sympathy. (At the same time I can appreciate the difficulty of delivering lines telling an actress you’re about to drown her in molten wax and you sincerely believe you’re doing her a favor!) House of Wax is one of those remakes that would seem like a perfectly good film if you hadn’t seen the original, but if you have it can only come off a poor second best — and it also doesn’t help that despite the major effort they took to film this in 3-D (even though the director they hired, André de Toth, was not only better known for Westerns and noirs than horror films but he only had one eye and therefore wasn’t able to see the 3-D effects himself — how Jack Warner) they used the cheap in-house WarnerColor process and therefore the color isn’t much better than the two-strip Technicolor of the original! — 10/18/03
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By one of those freak mischances that happens to long-time film buffs, I happened to see the long-lost original version of House of Wax, the 1933 horror thriller Mystery of the Wax Museum, well before I saw House of Wax itself. Film historian Tino Balio describes Mystery of the Wax Museum as “a typical Warner Bros. newspaper drama dons a fright wig and tries to pass itself off as a Universal picture,” and there’s something to that: the story of Mystery opens in 1920 and its main portion is set in 1933 (in fact the 1933 New Year’s celebration in Times Square, complete with the dropping ball of lights, is shown in the movie — and it’s fascinating to see what it looked like then as opposed to now), and the recognizably contemporary setting helps set off the horrors and makes them seem more immediate.
I saw Mystery in 1970 right when the last surviving print had one of its initial showings at the San Francisco Film Festival (it was a midnight double bill that also included James Whale’s magnificent original version of The Old Dark House, also newly rediscovered then) and House of Wax in 1971 when a reissue company licensed the rights to the original 3-D version and showed it theatrically, also in San Francisco. House of Wax was ballyhooed as the first 3-D feature produced by a major studio; remembering what going to sound had done for his company in 1927, Jack Warner was always interested in technological advances, especially ones with high-level exploitation value, and as soon as he saw the grosses for the independently produced 3-D feature Bwana Devil he grabbed hold of the rights to the process and launched a heavy 3-D production program.
He also shot his 3-D films in color — albeit the cheap in-house “WarnerColor” process (actually Eastmancolor — the Eastman Kodak company, trying to extend their dominance of the home-photography market into the movie business, allowed the studios to use Eastmancolor and name it after themselves, which is how we got things like “WarnerColor” and “Metrocolor” — though Eastmancolor won a lot of business from Technicolor simply because it was easier and cheaper, since it only used one strip of film and could therefore be shot the same way as black-and-white instead of requiring a special camera to accommodate multiple strips of film) — and intended to expand the 3-D market from exploitation films like this one to serious movies like Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial “M” for Murder (which actually was shot in 3-D, though once the early fad was followed by an intense backlash that made “3-D” box-office poison it wasn’t released that way until 1982, when a surviving 3-D print had a special week-long exhibition in L.A.) and George Cukor’s A Star Is Born (though doing that in 3-D was never more than a vague intention; as 3-D’s popularity evaporated while CinemaScope’s burgeoned, Jack Warner switched the movie over to widescreen, originally trying it in his in-house “WarnerScope” process but eventually licensing CinemaScope when it turned out he couldn’t get his own anamorphic lenses ground in time).
As an exploitation of 3-D, House of Wax is quite good — even though every time I’ve seen it since 1971 it’s been “flat” (and I was disappointed when Warner Home Video put both it and Mystery of the Wax Museum out on DVD but didn’t give us the 3-D version of House of Wax); director André de Toth (who ironically had only one eye and therefore couldn’t see the film in 3-D himself) effectively stages the action, having the characters heave a few things at the camera in the course of fighting each other and including the novelty sequence in which the barker at Professor Henry Jarrod’s (Vincent Price) wax museum bounces paddleballs at the audience (that was great fun to watch in 3-D!), but he mostly gives us a straightforward-looking movie and doesn’t go overboard with the dimensional effects.
The problem is that Crane Wilbur, who rewrote Charles Belden’s original story for the remake, took out a lot of the elements that made the original film seem interesting. His biggest mistake was eliminating the reporter character, played memorably in Mystery by Glenda Farrell, who puts together the clues and ultimately figures out that the bodies in the wax museum are actually real corpses dipped in wax by its insane owner (in the earlier version the proprietor was named “Ivan Igor” and was played by Lionel Atwill, a far subtler and less campy actor than Price; and the ingénue who suffers the indignity of almost being bathed in wax because she reminds Igor/Jarrod of his old statue of Marie Antoinette was played by Fay Wray in the second of her three films with Atwill: the others were Doctor X and The Vampire Bat); instead the ingénue, here played by Phyllis Kirk (later the first Mrs. Mort Sahl), more or less stumbles on the truth herself. Without an energetic character like Farrell’s reporter to give the film life and drive, it pretty much stumbles along from one climax to another.
Part of Farrell’s function in the original is given in the remake to Carolyn Jones, who plays a woman who lives in the same boarding house as Kirk and who gets murdered by Jarrod and his equally bonkers assistants, the mute Igor (played by a young and barely recognizable Charles Bronson under his original last name, Bushinsky) and the alcoholic Leon Averill (an uncredited Nedrick Young — he was a victim of the Hollywood blacklist and so his Academy Award-winning script for Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones was credited to one “Nathan E. Douglas”), because she resembles Jarrod’s old statue of Joan of Arc. In the original this part was “played” by Monica Bannister, who was never seen as a living character in the movie but who was shown standing stock still in the wax museum as Joan (a lot of the “wax figures” in both films were actually live humans because real wax statues would have melted if exposed too long to the harsh, powerful and very hot lights needed for filming); in this version Jones gets a scene with a sugar daddy she’s hoping will marry her and she’s not only made up in a blonde wig but she’s cooing and delivering her lines in a low-grade imitation of Marilyn Monroe’s breathy style. (Later Phyllis Kirk discovers the truth about her when she lifts the black wig adorning her corpse in the Joan of Arc exhibit and sees her “real” blonde hair underneath — ironic because Carolyn Jones was raven-haired in real life and in her most famous role as Morticia on the TV show The Addams Family.)
House of Wax also suffers from some Production Code-mandated compromises; Averill, a hopeless alcoholic in this version, was a heroin addict in Mystery — and somehow the plot gimmick of the cops getting him to confess by offering him a drink if he does just doesn’t have the power of the original version, in which they offered him a fix — though somehow another Vincent Price movie, Dragonwyck (made in 1946, seven years before House of Wax), managed to escape the usually ironclad Production Code provision against the mere mention of drug addiction. It’s a good movie but the original is just better — better directed (by Michael Curtiz), scripted and acted (Atwill brings to his role something of the demented sincerity of Boris Karloff’s portrayal in The Mummy — both films feature surprisingly moving scenes in which the madmen try to persuade their love interests to let them kill them so they can be “immortalized” in a twisted, life-threatening way — while Price, in the film that “typed” him as a horror star, already shows signs of the campy approach to the genre that later became his trademark), and with marvelous Caligari-esque sets by Anton Grot instead of plain, overly “realistic” ones by Stanley Fleischer.
House of Wax also suffers from the decision to move the action to the 1900’s, which allows the women to wear flattering period costumes but also distances us from the action instead of hurling it in our faces the way the 1930’s setting of the original did. Still, House of Wax is a good movie (and one which would be well worth a theatrical 3-D reissue!); it’s just not as good as the earlier version. — 11/1/10
I’m more familiar with the original version of House of Wax, the 1933 Mystery of the Wax Museum, even though that version was thought lost until 1970 (when a copy turned up in Jack Warner’s private collection) and the later version is far more widely shown, since it was the first major-studio production released in 3-D (Arch Oboler’s independently-made Bwana Devil had preceded it) and it was the movie that “typed” its star, Vincent Price, as a horror actor instead of the lounge-lizard supporting player he’d been in Laura and most of his previous movies. House of Wax is actually a pretty dull movie, especially seen “flat.”
The earlier Mystery of the Wax Museum is a far better film, with faster-paced direction by Michael Curtiz (although House of Wax director André de Toth — it’s so like Jack Warner to have assigned his first 3-D production to a director who had only one eye and therefore could not watch his own movie in 3-D — did get a few effectively noir-ish compositions into his movie, notably in the scene in which Phyllis Kirk enters the room of her roommate, who we know has been murdered but she does not), a more incisive “star” performance by Lionel Atwill (he acts the part of the mad monster artist with real conviction and panache, whereas Price seems to be “phoning it in” through much of the film) and far better casting of the female roles.
Fay Wray’s casting as the woman in distress in the original is probably predictable, but at least she portrays the role as a credible human being — Kirk speaks all her lines in a dead monotone that suggests a casting-couch hire on her first day in acting class. And the elimination of the reporter character played by Glenda Farrell in the original really hurts the film, not only in making it considerably more plodding (the use of the reporter enables the “mystery of the wax museum” to be solved far more quickly and incisively in the earlier version) but also in depriving it of the energy the original film gained from her rapid-fire performance. The best moments in House of Wax are the ones taken most directly from the original movie: the burning of the original wax museum at the beginning and the near-incineration of the heroine under a spray of molten wax at the end — both with so many setups and cuts taken almost directly from the original movie that it’s hard to believe de Toth hadn’t seen the original when he made this one! — 6/24/95
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I ran Charles the 1953 House of Wax as a follow-up to seeing the original version, Mystery of the Wax Museum, the night before. My impression that the original was much the better movie was only confirmed this time around — though had the video offered the film in its original 3-D format (if a reissue label like Rhino could do that for Cat Women of the Moon and the 1961 Mask, certainly Warner Home Video could have offered a 3-D print and two pair of glasses with every copy of this DVD!) the difference might have been a little narrower, In 3-D the famous paddle-ball sequence (staged by a performer playing a carnival barker Vincent Price, in the role played by Lionel Atwill in Mystery, has hired to drum up interest in his museum, which is actually called “House of Wax”!) is absolutely stunning; in 2-D it just looks gratuitous and a bit silly.
Crane Wilbur’s rehash of the original Carl Erickson-Don Mullaly screenplay (they don’t get credit on the remake but Charles Belden, who wrote the original story, does) moves the film back from a contemporary setting to the first years of the 20th century, changes all the character names (though “Igor,” now pronounced “EE-gor” instead of the first version’s “EYE-gor,” is no longer the name of the mad sculptor but his mute assistant — and that, not the addict sidekick, is the role Charles Bronson played under his birth last name, Buchinsky) and, most damagingly, eliminates the Glenda Farrell reporter character altogether. Instead the damsel in distress, Phyllis Kirk (who as a version of ethereal loveliness hardly competes with Fay Wray!), unravels the mystery herself after the murder of her roommate (Carolyn Jones, who unlike Monica Bannister in the original, actually does get to appear on screen as a live person before being waxified and put on exhibit as Joan of Arc).
House of Wax launched Vincent Price on his career as a horror star; he’d worked in the genre before but this was the film that “typed” him the way Frankenstein “typed” Boris Karloff — though at this juncture it’s hard to see why; while Karloff, Lugosi and Atwill took their horror parts seriously Price, even this early, camped his way through his, turning in an entertaining but superficial performance here whereas Atwill in Mystery had achieved real pathos and even a certain level of sympathy. (At the same time I can appreciate the difficulty of delivering lines telling an actress you’re about to drown her in molten wax and you sincerely believe you’re doing her a favor!) House of Wax is one of those remakes that would seem like a perfectly good film if you hadn’t seen the original, but if you have it can only come off a poor second best — and it also doesn’t help that despite the major effort they took to film this in 3-D (even though the director they hired, André de Toth, was not only better known for Westerns and noirs than horror films but he only had one eye and therefore wasn’t able to see the 3-D effects himself — how Jack Warner) they used the cheap in-house WarnerColor process and therefore the color isn’t much better than the two-strip Technicolor of the original! — 10/18/03
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By one of those freak mischances that happens to long-time film buffs, I happened to see the long-lost original version of House of Wax, the 1933 horror thriller Mystery of the Wax Museum, well before I saw House of Wax itself. Film historian Tino Balio describes Mystery of the Wax Museum as “a typical Warner Bros. newspaper drama dons a fright wig and tries to pass itself off as a Universal picture,” and there’s something to that: the story of Mystery opens in 1920 and its main portion is set in 1933 (in fact the 1933 New Year’s celebration in Times Square, complete with the dropping ball of lights, is shown in the movie — and it’s fascinating to see what it looked like then as opposed to now), and the recognizably contemporary setting helps set off the horrors and makes them seem more immediate.
I saw Mystery in 1970 right when the last surviving print had one of its initial showings at the San Francisco Film Festival (it was a midnight double bill that also included James Whale’s magnificent original version of The Old Dark House, also newly rediscovered then) and House of Wax in 1971 when a reissue company licensed the rights to the original 3-D version and showed it theatrically, also in San Francisco. House of Wax was ballyhooed as the first 3-D feature produced by a major studio; remembering what going to sound had done for his company in 1927, Jack Warner was always interested in technological advances, especially ones with high-level exploitation value, and as soon as he saw the grosses for the independently produced 3-D feature Bwana Devil he grabbed hold of the rights to the process and launched a heavy 3-D production program.
He also shot his 3-D films in color — albeit the cheap in-house “WarnerColor” process (actually Eastmancolor — the Eastman Kodak company, trying to extend their dominance of the home-photography market into the movie business, allowed the studios to use Eastmancolor and name it after themselves, which is how we got things like “WarnerColor” and “Metrocolor” — though Eastmancolor won a lot of business from Technicolor simply because it was easier and cheaper, since it only used one strip of film and could therefore be shot the same way as black-and-white instead of requiring a special camera to accommodate multiple strips of film) — and intended to expand the 3-D market from exploitation films like this one to serious movies like Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial “M” for Murder (which actually was shot in 3-D, though once the early fad was followed by an intense backlash that made “3-D” box-office poison it wasn’t released that way until 1982, when a surviving 3-D print had a special week-long exhibition in L.A.) and George Cukor’s A Star Is Born (though doing that in 3-D was never more than a vague intention; as 3-D’s popularity evaporated while CinemaScope’s burgeoned, Jack Warner switched the movie over to widescreen, originally trying it in his in-house “WarnerScope” process but eventually licensing CinemaScope when it turned out he couldn’t get his own anamorphic lenses ground in time).
As an exploitation of 3-D, House of Wax is quite good — even though every time I’ve seen it since 1971 it’s been “flat” (and I was disappointed when Warner Home Video put both it and Mystery of the Wax Museum out on DVD but didn’t give us the 3-D version of House of Wax); director André de Toth (who ironically had only one eye and therefore couldn’t see the film in 3-D himself) effectively stages the action, having the characters heave a few things at the camera in the course of fighting each other and including the novelty sequence in which the barker at Professor Henry Jarrod’s (Vincent Price) wax museum bounces paddleballs at the audience (that was great fun to watch in 3-D!), but he mostly gives us a straightforward-looking movie and doesn’t go overboard with the dimensional effects.
The problem is that Crane Wilbur, who rewrote Charles Belden’s original story for the remake, took out a lot of the elements that made the original film seem interesting. His biggest mistake was eliminating the reporter character, played memorably in Mystery by Glenda Farrell, who puts together the clues and ultimately figures out that the bodies in the wax museum are actually real corpses dipped in wax by its insane owner (in the earlier version the proprietor was named “Ivan Igor” and was played by Lionel Atwill, a far subtler and less campy actor than Price; and the ingénue who suffers the indignity of almost being bathed in wax because she reminds Igor/Jarrod of his old statue of Marie Antoinette was played by Fay Wray in the second of her three films with Atwill: the others were Doctor X and The Vampire Bat); instead the ingénue, here played by Phyllis Kirk (later the first Mrs. Mort Sahl), more or less stumbles on the truth herself. Without an energetic character like Farrell’s reporter to give the film life and drive, it pretty much stumbles along from one climax to another.
Part of Farrell’s function in the original is given in the remake to Carolyn Jones, who plays a woman who lives in the same boarding house as Kirk and who gets murdered by Jarrod and his equally bonkers assistants, the mute Igor (played by a young and barely recognizable Charles Bronson under his original last name, Bushinsky) and the alcoholic Leon Averill (an uncredited Nedrick Young — he was a victim of the Hollywood blacklist and so his Academy Award-winning script for Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones was credited to one “Nathan E. Douglas”), because she resembles Jarrod’s old statue of Joan of Arc. In the original this part was “played” by Monica Bannister, who was never seen as a living character in the movie but who was shown standing stock still in the wax museum as Joan (a lot of the “wax figures” in both films were actually live humans because real wax statues would have melted if exposed too long to the harsh, powerful and very hot lights needed for filming); in this version Jones gets a scene with a sugar daddy she’s hoping will marry her and she’s not only made up in a blonde wig but she’s cooing and delivering her lines in a low-grade imitation of Marilyn Monroe’s breathy style. (Later Phyllis Kirk discovers the truth about her when she lifts the black wig adorning her corpse in the Joan of Arc exhibit and sees her “real” blonde hair underneath — ironic because Carolyn Jones was raven-haired in real life and in her most famous role as Morticia on the TV show The Addams Family.)
House of Wax also suffers from some Production Code-mandated compromises; Averill, a hopeless alcoholic in this version, was a heroin addict in Mystery — and somehow the plot gimmick of the cops getting him to confess by offering him a drink if he does just doesn’t have the power of the original version, in which they offered him a fix — though somehow another Vincent Price movie, Dragonwyck (made in 1946, seven years before House of Wax), managed to escape the usually ironclad Production Code provision against the mere mention of drug addiction. It’s a good movie but the original is just better — better directed (by Michael Curtiz), scripted and acted (Atwill brings to his role something of the demented sincerity of Boris Karloff’s portrayal in The Mummy — both films feature surprisingly moving scenes in which the madmen try to persuade their love interests to let them kill them so they can be “immortalized” in a twisted, life-threatening way — while Price, in the film that “typed” him as a horror star, already shows signs of the campy approach to the genre that later became his trademark), and with marvelous Caligari-esque sets by Anton Grot instead of plain, overly “realistic” ones by Stanley Fleischer.
House of Wax also suffers from the decision to move the action to the 1900’s, which allows the women to wear flattering period costumes but also distances us from the action instead of hurling it in our faces the way the 1930’s setting of the original did. Still, House of Wax is a good movie (and one which would be well worth a theatrical 3-D reissue!); it’s just not as good as the earlier version. — 11/1/10
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