Mr. Wong in Chinatown (Monogram, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie was Mr. Wong in Chinatown, one of two ultra-cheapie tapes I had picked up at Suncoast while we were in Horton Plaza (the other was D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln, which I haven’t seen in years and look forward to seeing again —ironically, on the night John Gallagher and I saw a film featuring Anjelica Huston I had bought a tape of an old movie starring her grandfather, Walter Huston, who played Lincoln). Mr. Wong in Chinatown was a good “B” movie, hampered by the usual limitations — low budget, sets that looked like they were about to fall over, lousy and inappropriate “library” music, sluggish direction by William Nigh (the plot, by W. Scott Darling, could actually have been exciting and suspenseful in the hands of a better director — what was Edgar G. Ulmer doing that week, one wonders?) and a “Chinese” makeup on Boris Karloff which wouldn’t have fooled anybody (and it didn’t help that Karloff, unlike Warner Oland — whose Charlie Chan movies this one was obviously imitating — spoke in his normal British accent and speech patterns without even the slightest attempt to sound Chinese, either). But it also had a better-than-usual cast (a young Marjorie Reynolds as the hotshot reporter and Grant Withers as the police detective, who’s also Reynolds’ boyfriend, who gets tired of her getting in the way and trying to use every available telephone to call in her scoops), an unusually strong plot and some good atmospherics; also some nice stock shots of San Francisco (especially nostalgia-inducing for those of us who lived there once) showing what the city looked like in the late 1930’s. — 12/10/93

•••••

Anyway, the experience of watching Chan Is Missing inspired me to spend this morning running the two “Mr. Wong” movies, endearingly tacky in the Monogram manner but still well cast (especially Evelyn Brent as a villainess in Mr. Wong, Detective and Marjorie Reynolds as a sob-sister reporter in Mr. Wong in Chinatown — hard to believe that, within three years after making this “B” and two others in the Wong series, she was singing and dancing with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire in a big-budget musical, Holiday Inn, with a score by Irving Berlin!) and well played by Boris Karloff in the lead, though coloring and greasing down his hair with black shoe polish and giving him a little eyeliner to suggest Asian eyes did not turn him, visually, into a credible Chinese. The Wong films suffer by comparison with the Charlie Chan vehicles at Fox on which they were obviously modeled, due not only to higher production values but also the characters of Charlie Chan’s children, which in their own 1930’s way dramatized the assimilation/native culture dilemma of the immigrant (though the Charlie Chan movies blew their chance to dramatize effectively the clash of Eastern and Western cultural values by abandoning the Hawai’ian setting of the Chan books, Hawai’i being a dramatically fascinating atmosphere in which American, Oriental and Polynesian cultures meet, mix and clash). Still, the mystery angles were well done (though the gimmick of Mr. Wong, Detective — that the murderer does indeed turn out to be the most likely suspect the police have been suspecting all along — is strictly from desperation). — 11/15/94

•••••

I went to Charles’ place and ran him the videotape of the film Mr. Wong in Chinatown. I’ve actually always liked this film, and for all its Monogramesque crudity it’s actually neatly done, with a good story (W. Scott Darling is the only author credited), atmospheric photography and a good performance by Karloff as a Chinese detective in San Francisco (with what looks like lacquer in his hair to paste it down and make him look suitably exotic) making up for William Nigh’s sluggish direction (where was Edgar G. Ulmer the week that Monogram needed him?). — 11/3/98

•••••

I screened one of the films I had had a copy of before: Mr. Wong in Chinatown, the third film in the series and the one that introduced Marjorie Reynolds as Roberta “Robby” Logan, reporter on the San Francisco Herald and in a love-hate relationship with another continuing series character, Captain Street of the San Francisco Police Department (Grant Withers, Loretta Young’s first husband and star of James Cagney’s and Joan Blondell’s first film, Sinners’ Holiday). Chinatown stands out in the series for having the strongest plot — Chinese princess Lin Hwa (Lotus Long) is murdered in Wong’s living room via a poisoned dart fired by a Chinese blow gun, and it develops that she was in the country to buy airplanes for her warlord brother, only the “aviation company” she was dealing with was a scam outfit that was conning her out of her money — as well as some genuine action scenes (including a car explosion, a fistfight and a strong climax on a Chinese ship where Wong has been held after being kidnapped), more creative direction from Nigh than usual (including at least one of the Venetian-blind shots he loved), a better-than-usual sense of suspense and pace, and the obvious knockoff of the Torchy Blane series in the relationship between Logan and Street (and Reynolds, who’d later appear in the big musical Holiday Inn opposite Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire after Mary Martin had to withdraw because she was pregnant with Larry Hagman, does a quite good job of channeling Glenda Farrell). This time the killer’s identity is a real surprise — though the primary suspects are Captain Jaime (William Royle) of the Maid of Orient vessel that brought the Princess to San Francisco and Captain Guy Jackson of the phony “Phelps Aviation Co.” and partner with Jaime in the scheme to defraud the Princess (who wrote the words “Captain J” on a notepad just before she died, expiring before she could finish the last name), the actual murderer turns out to be Davidson, the banker with the Exchange Bank of Hankow (which turns into the Specie Bank of Hankow midway through the film — just as the “Palace Hotel” becomes the “Palliser Hotel” before Chinatown ends and, as the American Film Institute Catalog notes, both Street’s rank in the police department and his first name changed from film to film in the series) who realized the deal was a scam and decided to scam the scammers by forging Lin Hwa’s signature and draining her account to cover up his own previous embezzlements. So far the only Wong I haven’t seen is entry number four, The Fatal Hour (after Karloff’s horror comeback with the re-release of the original Frankenstein on a double bill with Dracula in 1938, and Universal’s subsequent success with Son of Frankenstein in 1939, Monogram started giving the Wongs more “horrific” titles to draw in more of Karloff’s usual audience), but Chinatown seems to be the best of the other five and a quite worthwhile film to come from a usually chintzy company like second-iteration Monogram. — 6/23/05

•••••

Two nights ago Charles and I watched the 1939 Monogram (second iteration) detective “B” Mr. Wong in Chinatown, third of the six-film series Monogram produced between 1938 and 1940 based on the character of James Lee Wong, a Chinese detective created by author Hugh Wiley for a series of stories in Collier’s magazine. To play Wong, Monogram signed Boris Karloff, who’d just been let go by Universal after the contract he’d signed after his star-making turn in the 1931 Frankenstein expired with the quite charming but decidedly non-horrific 1937 film Night Key. It wasn’t that Karloff was hurting for work — being British and therefore a native English speaker, he wasn’t handicapped the way Bela Lugosi was by having to learn his parts phonetically, and he was a good enough actor to play ordinary character villains as well as monsters and mad scientists. Indeed, in 1939 Karloff was defying the studio system by maintaining non-exclusive contracts with four studios simultaneously: Universal (which re-signed him to do Son of Frankenstein, his third and last performance as Frankenstein’s monster unless you count a 1960’s TV episode of Route 66 he and Lon Chaney, Jr. did as the Monster and the Wolf-Man, respectively), Columbia (which gave him a series of roles in which he plays a scientist anxious to help humanity who goes off the rails and becomes an obsessed murderer), Warner Bros. (which after making a classic-style horror film, The Walking Dead, in 1936 thereafter used Karloff in action melodramas, mostly remakes), and Monogram.

Monogram obviously wanted to make movies about James Lee Wong in hopes he’d be their answer to Charlie Chan — whose own series was on hiatus because of the fatal illness of actor Warner Oland; 20^th Century-Fox made the last Oland Chan, Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo, in late 1937 before Oland became too ill to work, and after Oland died they didn’t make another Chan film until nearly two years later, after they recruited Sidney Toler to take over the role. So there was a “Chinese detective gap” in Hollywood that Monogram planned to fill, and with horror films considered out of fashion in 1936-38 Karloff was eager to sign for the series because it meant more work. Then in 1938 an independent theatre owner in Los Angeles decided to dredge up the 1930 Dracula and 1931 Frankenstein and show them as a double bill, drawing audiences in with the usual see-them-if-you-dare publicity hype — and he got lines stretching two blocks from his theatre. Universal noticed and did a double-bill reissue of the films nationwide, and all of a sudden horror films were back “in” again and Karloff was, as William K. Everson politely put it, “a much bigger name than Monogram could have afforded if he were not already contracted.” The first three Wong films had titles featuring the character’s name — Mr. Wong, Detective; The Mystery of Mr. Wong and Mr. Wong in Chinatown — but then Monogram slapped horror-sounding titles on Wongs four and five (The Fatal Hour and Doomed to Die, respectively), and for the sixth, Phantom of Chinatown, they pulled Karloff out of the series, made a mad-scientist movie with him (The Ape) similar to the ones he’d been doing at Columbia, and recast Wong with … Keye Luke. What a concept: a Chinese detective in an American movie actually being played by a Chinese actor! The only other example I can think of in the classic era is the Paramount 1937 “B” Daughter of Shanghai, in which Philip Ahn (who would have been a perfect choice for Charlie Chan if Fox and/or Monogram had been interested in using a real Chinese) played a Chinese-American FBI agent who teams up with Anna May Wong to catch a sinister band of human smugglers sneaking undocumented immigrants from China into the U.S.

Anyway, Mr. Wong in Chinatown was the third Wong and for a long time I thought it was the best in the series — I first saw it in the 1980’s on a cheap VHS tape from an outfit called Goodtimes Video (which also gave me my first glimpse of The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy and for their issue of Ghosts on the Loose, combining the East Side Kids with Bela Lugosi and Ava Gardner, they repeated the next-to-last reel so the film lasted 72 instead of 62 minutes and one wondered why we were re-seeing scenes we’d just seen) and I was impressed with the legitimately complicated plot and some genuine visual atmosphere from the usually ultra-hacky director William Nigh. The plot: Princess Lin Hwa (Lotus Long, who was actually something of a star so it’s a bit of a surprise to see her play a part in which she’s dispatched in the first few minutes) comes to see Mr. Wong and gets intercepted by his houseboy Willie (Lee Tong Foo — yeah, right, the star is literally Anglo but his servant is played by an actual Chinese) because Wong is hunched over a chemistry table doing an experiment (I know what you’re thinking, but this is a perfectly normal chemical reaction and not the more sinister type of “science” Karloff’s characters usually performed). Alas, while she’s waiting to see Wong, an unseen assailant aims through Wong’s open window and kills her with a poisoned dart from a spring-loaded Chinese weapon that’s noiseless, easily concealed on one’s forearm and — though this wouldn’t have been a consideration in 1939 — wouldn’t be detected by airport security because it’s made of bamboo. Ironically, though Wong recognizes her ring as being from a particular Chinese family clan, he doesn’t have any idea who the victim was — nor does police captain Bill Street (Grant Withers, reduced to “B” work after his star buildup at Warner Bros. in the early 1930’s didn’t take and neither did his marriage to Loretta Young — she had it annulled), the typical dumb-cop foil for the brilliant private detective. Fortunately, nosy reporter Roberta “Bobbie” Logan (Marjorie Reynolds), introduced to the series in this episode and obviously patterned on the Torchy Blane character Warner Bros. had been doing as a series (including the tempestuous relationship between her and Capt. Street — they date by night but by day he’s trying to keep her out of his crime scenes, at one point handcuffing her to a chair in Wong’s living room — she escapes by pulling apart the chair and walking around with one arm from it dangling from her own wrist) covered her arrival in the U.S. and therefore knew exactly who she was.

It turns out that Lin Hwa had come to San Francisco (where the Wongs were set) with $1 million in bank drafts to buy a fleet of airplanes for her brother, a Chinese warlord, and to do that she was meeting with Captain Jaime (William Royle) of the Maid of the Orient, a cargo ship with a few passenger spaces on which she made the crossing and planned to take back with the planes on board. She was also in touch with Captain Jackson (Peter George Lynn), San Francisco sales representative of the Phelps Aviation Company in Los Angeles (noting the last name, Charles inevitably joked, “God hates planes”), who was also on the ship. Indeed, when she was dying she scrawled “Captain J” on a piece of paper on Wong’s desk, leading both Wong and the police to suspect both Jaime and Jackson — who are indeed in on a scheme to defraud Lin Hwa, since it turns out the “Phelps Aviation Company” is a scam, renting a hangar and a couple of ancient biplanes in L.A. to make it look like they manufacture aircraft when in reality they do nothing. Alas, the two Captains “J” are pissed off because they can’t steal Lin Hwa’s money — her banker, Mr. Davidson (Huntley Gordon) of the Specie Bank of Hankow, has already drained her bank account and forged her signature in both English and Chinese (which he learned how to write while working at the bank’s home office in Hankow), and he killed Lin Hwa and her maid as well as his own hired assassin, a part played by little-person actor Angelo Rossitto. A little person sneaking up the sides of buildings and knocking people off with a blow gun — you don’t suppose writer W. Scott Darling had read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four, do you? The three baddies have a massive falling-out which ends with a reasonably exciting climax on the Maid of the Orient as it’s about to sail — and the two “J”’s are going to take Wong, whom they’ve kidnapped, out to sea and dump him. Of course both the police and our intrepid reporter Bobble Logan (whom I imagined saying to the other cast members, “Have some respect for me! In three years I’ll be doing a big musical with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire!”) find out what’s going on in time, Davidson gets killed and the two “J”’s are captured.

I had long thought Mr. Wong in Chinatown was the best of the series until I saw episode four, The Fatal Hour, which began with a marvelous plotline involving the murder of Captain Street’s best friend on the police force, Dan Grady, killed while investigating a ring of criminals illegally excavating and smuggling ancient Chinese artifacts. When I saw The Fatal Hour I wrote about it, “The most convincing aspect of the early reels is — surprise! — Grant Withers’ genuine pathos in expressing his character’s grief for the man he started with in the police department. For once Withers actually expresses deep emotion instead of just playing the irascible screamer he was through most of the series — indeed, [writer Scott] Darling’s script and Withers’ performance puts the grief so much front and center that when Boris Karloff enters as Mr. Wong he seems like an extra in his own vehicle. Had the film focused on Bill Street and his determination to avenge the murder of his friend and fellow cop, The Fatal Hour could have been a fine movie and an important proto-noir; instead, after a quite impressive start the usual Monogram formulae take over and the film assumes the stately talkiness of the first two Wongs (relieved a bit in Mr. Wong in Chinatown simply because on that go-round Darling actually got some real action in his script).” The basic problems with all the Mr. Wong movies are that “stately talkiness” and the fact that Mr. Wong himself simply isn’t that interesting a character: he’s living alone (except for that annoying houseboy) and the charm of Charlie Chan’s family relationships is sorely missed. As Wong, Boris Karloff is practically immobile, wrapped up in almost as much facial makeup as he was wearing in Frankenstein or The Mummy, including a bit of “tweaking” around the eyes to make him look Asian, and his hair plastered onto his scalp with shoe polish (Karloff was nearly 50 when he made this film and his real hair had already gone grey). Karloff tries his best, as always, but the part really offered him nothing in particular to work with; he just steers himself through the scene, delivers his lines but doesn’t have the material with which to create the quirkily charming characters Oland and Toler both made of Charlie Chan (Oland more so, at least in my opinion). He’s just Boris Karloff in odd makeup playing a good guy, for a change. — 10/7/15

Love and Mercy (River Road Entertainment, Battle Mountain Films, Lionsgate, 2014, released 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Friday night I screened Charles Love & Mercy, a biopic of Brian Wilson, founder of the Beach Boys, whose bizarre career trajectory from brilliant young genius to drug-induced psychotic to puppet of his controversial therapist Dr. Eugene Landy to his ultimate separation, full recovery and late-in-life comeback as a sort of elder statesman of music would seem to be made for the big screen. I’m familiar with the story from a lot of sources, including the reports that came out about it when it was still going on as well as Steven Gaines’ 1980’s biography of the Beach Boys, Heroes and Villains (which also dealt with Brian’s brother Dennis Wilson and his relationship with Charles Manson, who was hoping Dennis would get him a record contract so he could make the album that he thought would spark an apocalyptic race war — when he didn’t get signed he targeted the man whom he’d thought would sign him — Terry Melcher of Columbia Records, Doris Day’s son — by ordering the killings of Sharon Tate and four other people who were staying at the home Melcher had formerly occupied, and which Manson thought Melcher owned) and Brian Wilson’s own autobiography, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, published in 1992. (Wouldn’t It Be Nice credits a co-writer, Todd Gold, and the Wikipedia page on Brian Wilson says that in a 1992 lawsuit Brian said he never even read the finished book; it also claims he’s working on another ghost-written “autobiography.”) The film picks up Brian Wilson’s story when he’s in the middle of recording the backing tracks for the Beach Boys’ masterpiece, Pet Sounds — a commercial disappointment (though not, as depicted in the movie, an outright flop; it did break three AM radio hit singles) — under the arrangement Brian worked out with his bandmates by which he would remain at home, write songs and record backing tracks while the rest of the Beach Boys toured. (Brian actually stopped touring with the Beach Boys a year and a half before Pet Sounds was recorded, but it’s not terribly surprising that screenwriters Oren Moyerman and Michael Alan Lerner — who, ironically, shares two-thirds of his name with another legendary songwriter — did this elementary bit of telescoping.)

The film accurately depicts the arguments Brian got into with the other Beach Boys — especially his cousin Mike Love — over his new material, with Mike arguing that the Beach Boys had hit on a successful formula with songs about surfing, fast cars, California sunshine and young love, and they shouldn’t leave their audience behind by changing their style. Brian counter-argued that the audience was leaving them; he’d heard the Beatles’ album Rubber Soul and realized that the future of music was in elaborate productions and sophisticated lyrics, and he was competitive enough to want to make an album that would top Rubber Soul. An awful lot of people thought Pet Sounds had topped the Beatles — and one of them was Paul McCartney, who went back into the studio determined to make an album that would top the Beach Boys’ masterwork. The Beatles next released Revolver, and Brian heard it and was determined to top it, so he hooked up with producer, songwriter and lyricist Van Dyke Parks to create the most famous stillborn album in history, Smile (whose title became such a byword for recording projects that fell flat due to their own overambitiousness that Charles Mingus’ Epitaph, a piece he premiered at New York’s Town Hall in 1962 and which was in such a state of incompletion that Mingus had copyists backstage writing the parts for part two while the band was onstage playing part one — as “Mingus’ Smile”).

When he’s stuck a “friend” offers Brian LSD, he goes on a trip and tells his then-wife Marilyn Rovell that he’s just seen God — according to Wouldn’t It Be Nice, Brian actually took LSD two years earlier than that, just before recording “California Girls,” and though lyrically it’s an old-fashioned Beach Boys song, the shimmer in the musical arrangement was a direct result of Brian’s LSD use — at least that’s how Brian told the story a quarter-century ago in a book whose “take” on much of Brian’s life was very different from what he thinks about it now (the closing credits of Love and Mercy credit him with cooperating with the project). The film intercuts between Brian Wilson in the late 1980’s as he meets and falls in love with ex-model turned Cadillac salesperson Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) and Brian in the mid-1960’s and early 1970’s as he gets more and more obsessive about Smile, then suddenly abandons the project (according to Steven Gaines, he had another meeting with Paul McCartney, who came out to California with a tape of the Beatles’ song “A Day in the Life,” and Brian’s face drained white as he realized that the Beatles had already accomplished everything he’d hoped to do with Smile; Brian’s own account in Wouldn’t It Be Nice was that he heard Paul play “She’s Leaving Home” but somehow it doesn’t seem to me that a live vocal-and-piano performance of one of the least “psychedelic” songs on Sgt. Pepper would have had the huge ego-destroying effect on Brian Wilson as hearing “A Day in the Life” in the form we know it from the recording, and the writers of Love and Mercy seem to attribute the abandonment of Smile to yet another argument between Brian and his father, Murry Wilson, with whom he had a relationship similar to Leopold and Wolfgang Mozart: the mediocre musician who realized he’d sired a genius and tried to exploit him), retreats to his bed and hardly ever leaves for two, three or four years (the accounts differ) except to get food from the refrigerator and (presumably) use the bathroom.

His weight balloons to nearly 300 pounds and Marilyn decides to act, first by putting a padlock on the refrigerator door and then calling in Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), who had developed a system of treating celebrity patients by taking over their lives 24/7, surrounding them with minders and bodyguards (when the movie Brian first meets Melinda at the car dealership where she works, he points out his “bodyguard” and muses on how odd a word that is) and gives Brian the full-dress treatment. By 1976 Brian is well enough that Warner Bros., which then had the Beach Boys under contract, mounts a full-dress “Brian Is Back!” campaign, including starring the Beach Boys in an NBC-TV special and booking Brian Wilson on Saturday Night Live, in which he performs a version of “Good Vibrations” with just his voice and piano, the piano mounted in a giant sandbox. The real Brian Wilson had done this in one of his crazier inspirations — he said he would be inspired if he could feel sand under his feet as he composed — only the giant sandbox ended up being a giant litter box for Brian’s pets (he had cats, though in the movie we see only dogs). When Brian wrote Wouldn’t It Be Nice he was still under Landy’s influence — he’d flown the coop in the late 1970’s, then been arrested as a homeless derelict in San Diego and taken to a hospital, where he recalled being treated by a Black nurse who jacked him off (not that that was going to end up in the movie — they had a PG-13 rating to protect!), and Landy came back slamming into his life and put him on an even tighter regimen of control than he had before. Wouldn’t It Be Nice depicts Dr. Landy as the angel of mercy who saved Brian Wilson’s life and nursed him back to creativity — at the end of the book Brian describes the lawsuit the other Beach Boys filed against him and Dr. Landy, demanding that Brian fire Landy as a condition of being allowed to remain in the Beach Boys, and it ends with him, feeling betrayed and hurt, facing an uncertain future without Dr. Landy’s influence. I remember this vividly because Brian was scheduled to do a book signing in San Diego and I was supposed to cover the event for a small local weekly — only at the last minute Dr. Landy insisted that the event be canceled, and it was.

Love and Mercy describes Dr. Landy as so domineering he’s practically insane himself; when he decides Melinda is getting too close to Brian and it’s threatening his control, he insists she not see him again (he’d previously ordered Brian to cut off all contact with his ex-wife Marilyn and their two daughters), and the lawsuit that forced Landy out of Brian’s life is depicted not as a betrayal but a liberation. Yet, ironically, the movie is titled after — and ends with a performance of — “Love and Mercy,” the first song on the 1989 Brian Wilson solo album Dr. Landy produced, even though the one scene we see from the recording of this album shows Dr. Landy browbeating Brian in his home studio and demanding he write a song … at once, in a scene that makes a powerful but not overstated parallel between the way Dr. Landy is treating Brian and the way his father treated him. (In Wouldn’t It Be Nice Brian describes his deal with Sire Records to release this album; his contract called for Sire to release a second album if the first sold over a certain number of copies, and Brian actually recorded the second album, with the revealing title Sweet Insanity, but Sire president Seymore Stein weaseled out of his contractual obligation to release it because, while the first album had met the sales quota, it had done so just barely.) The movie’s basic stratagem for showing Brian Wilson at two different stages of his life is to use two actors to play him — John Cusack as the late-1980’s Brian and Paul Dano as the mid-1960’s Brian (I love Paul Dano as an actor but I’m having the feeling about him I also had about Ryan Gosling: when is there going to be one casting director out there who casts him as someone normal?) — though they both look believable as the real person (the physical resemblances to the real Brian are strong) and as the same person at different ages. (This was a long-unrealized project of Josef von Sternberg: to portray a character’s complete life story by using different actors to play him or her at different ages.) There’s also a third Brian, since the film occasionally flashes back to his and his brothers’ childhoods and in those the son of the director, Bill Pohlad, plays Brian.

Love and Mercy inevitably leaves out a lot of the twists and turns of the real-life story — I remember a mid-1990’s TV-movie about the Beach Boys that took a much more morbid view of the material (including Murry Wilson suffering a fatal heart attack while listening to Lawrence Welk’s recording of “Two Step Side-Step,” the one Murry Wilson song actually recorded before the Beach Boys became successful, with his record player on repeat so the song plays over and over) — but on its own terms it’s a quite moving story, well told, and with the blue of the Southern California sky (at least when it isn’t smoggy!) and sea dominating the color scheme instead of everything being shoehorned into the dank green-and-brown look that constitutes virtually all of the spectrum we get to see in most color films today. One particularly subtle scene in the Moverman-Lerner script comes when Brian’s first wife Marilyn comes out of their house to his redoubt near the swimming pool to tell him he should come in because their daughter has just smiled her first smile — and Brian, so paralyzed with trauma over the collapse of his stillborn album, stays motionless because he can’t bear even to hear the word “smile.” It’s also well acted, with both Cusack and Dano standing out — though I suspect much of the music comes from the surviving session tapes of both Pet Sounds and Smile (both of which have been issued in multi-CD boxed sets for the true Beach Boys fanatic) and I believe many of the session directions we hear come from the real Brian Wilson — Cusack in particular manages to project just enough twitchiness we get the impression the character is not “all there,” as the saying goes, without making him too floridly crazy. And Elizabeth Banks matches the men in portraying a character whose love of Brian triumphs over her fear of him (and of Dr. Landy — the final credits feature some where-are-they-now titles that make clear the filmmakers’ view of her as the savior that got Brian out from under Dr. Landy’s thumb and set him on the path to sanity and functionality as both person and musician).

Lady of Burlesque (Hunt Stromberg/United Artists, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I ran Charles and I another double-bill from archive.org which attempts to reproduce what you might have seen at a cheap movie house in the mid-1940’s, including an excellent Warner Bros. cartoon called Claws for Alarm, in which the odd (to say the least!) couple of Porky Pig and Sylvester the Cat hole up in a haunted hotel called the Dry Gulch Inn and are menaced by a giant spider, phantom cats and such an overall air of silhouetted stylization we almost expect it to be called The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: The Cartoon Version. It also included a reasonably amusing Robert Benchley short called How to Be a Detective (the funniest gag was when Benchley instructs a police sketch artist to do a drawing showing a combination of facial features that supposedly mark someone as a criminal — and of course the resulting sketch looks like Benchley); it wasn’t as good as Home Movies, the Benchley short on the previous episode, but it was still fun. The “features” were the 1943 film Lady of Burlesque, produced by Hunt Stromberg after he left MGM and became an independent producer releasing through United Artists; and Mr. Wong in Chinatown, third in a series of six second-iteration Monogram “B” films featuring a Chinese super-detective obviously inspired (to put it politely) by Charlie Chan and played by Boris Karloff, who like Chan series star Warner Oland had played Dr. Fu Manchu (making Charlie Chan at the Opera, in which Oland starred as Chan and Karloff had a featured role as a red-herring suspect, a “doubles” movie).

Lady of Burlesque has long been a quirky favorite of mine — it’s not a great film but it has the greatest actress of all time, Barbara Stanwyck (that’s my opinion, based both on her intense emotionalism and her incredible range as a performer, encompassing melodrama, soap opera, romantic comedy, screwball comedy, musicals and film noir — no other actress of the classic era played so many different types of parts and only one, Meryl Streep, has since), starring in an oddball script by James Gunn based on a novel by Gypsy Rose Lee called The G-String Murders — which would have been a better title for the film given that G-strings are actually the murder weapon the killer uses to strangle two of the strippers who perform at the Opera House, which at the turn of the previous century used to be just that. Only the neighborhood deteriorated and so did the theatre’s offerings, until in the film’s 1943 presence it was a burlesque house operated by producer S. B. Foss (J. Edward Bromberg), who comes off as considerably nicer and more fatherly than most burlesque producers, either in other movies or in real life. Naturally Gunn and director William A. Wellman had a big problem getting a movie about burlesque, in which the lead character is a stripper (in the book the lead was actually called Gypsy Rose Lee, but for the film she became “Dixie Daisy,” t/n Deborah Hoople, and is played by Stanwyck in her best hard-bitten manner.

She gets to sing a song called “Take It Off the E-String (And Play It on the G-String),” and the voice — Stanwyck’s own (she’d previously sung in the 1932 film The Purchase Price and the 1941 comedy Ball of Fire, in which she’d done the swing hit “Drum Boogie” with Gene Krupa and his band — and done it at least as well as Irene Daye, Krupa’s singer when he made the original record two years earlier) — is a bit nasal and a bit flat, but works superbly as belonging to the kind of person we’re told she’s playing. The part doesn’t offer her that much depth — she’s basically shown in the first half of the movie doing her act and fending off the romantic advances of the show’s leading comic, Biff Brannigan (Michael O’Shea, who also played Jack London in Stromberg’s biopic of the author), while in the second act, after the murders start happening, she’s the implacable voice of vengeance, determined not only to find out who the killer is but nail him herself. Naturally she’s getting no support from the official police, represented by Inspector Harrigan (Charles Dingle), the sort of movie law-enforcement person whose whole approach is to browbeat all the potential suspects until one of them gives up and confesses.

Though it’s not one of Stanwyck’s great movies — it’s not Ladies of Leisure, Ladies They Talk About, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Ball of Fire, The Lady Eve, Double Indemnity or The Strange Love of Martha Ivers — it’s solidly entertaining and director Wellman gets the seedy atmosphere of the theatre just right. (It’s possible the graininess of the prints of this public-domain film adds to the overall tackiness of the surroundings.) Where the film falls short of what it could have been is that there isn’t much depth to the characterizations, and Michael O’Shea is so insufferable we have a hard time reading Stanwyck finally yielding to his advances as a happy ending. According to imdb.com, Gypsy Rose Lee based the character on her friend, comedian “Rags” Ragland — and judging from what I’ve seen from Ragland’s MGM films (he was well on his way to a major career as a character comedian in supporting roles when he died suddenly in 1945, breaking the heart of his former vaudeville partner Red Skelton) Lady of Burlesque would have been a better film if they could have borrowed Ragland from MGM to play the role. For all his zaniness, Ragland also had a streak of pathos which this part could have used; O’Shea, one of those odd actors who tried to fill James Cagney’s shoes and failed miserably (when I watched him as Jack London I was wishing Hunt Stromberg’s budget could have stretched for Cagney in the role!), is just offensive. There are some interesting supporting characters, including Princess Nirvena (Stephanie Batchelor), a burlesque performer who poses as a Continental royal and blackmails Foss into giving her a job because years before they had an affair; she’s the second victim, after Lolita LaVerne (Victoria Faust).

It’s not a particularly impressive mystery because there aren’t that many suspects — Lolita’s estranged husband, a gangster who roughs up one of the girls while a performance is going on (and Brannigan and his comic partners have to speak their lines louder to try to drown out the violence!), and the quirky character who turns out to be the killer [spoiler alert!]: “Stacchi” Stacciaro (Frank Conroy), the theatre’s prop man, who worked there when it still presented grand opera, was himself a star baritone who lost his voice, had been married to one of the other singers (Brannigan finds the key clue in an old Police Gazette that has a photo of her in what passed for undress in the 1890’s) and was determined to close down the burlesque house when he discovered that his granddaughter was working as one of the strippers. First he arranged for a police raid — and incidentally cut the cord to the special phone line Foss had installed so the people he’d bribed at the police department could warn him in advance when their fellow officers were about to stage a raid — and then he starts knocking off the strippers. He thinks he’s accomplished his aim when Foss decides that protecting the lives of his performers is more important than trying to stay open, but Dixie — in the sort of intense emotional moment that Stanwyck played so superlatively well but of which she gets only one in this film — pleads with him and her fellow strippers to keep it open, reasoning that if they shut down the theatre because of the murders, the killer will win. Of course, it’s also part of her plot to trap the killer into attacking her and thereby revealing himself.

Lady of Burlesque isn’t a great movie but it is solidly entertaining (despite Michael O’Shea’s insufferability as the leading man), and Stanwyck is oddly moving during her big speech in which, as part of her plea to keep the theatre open, she tells her fellow strippers that she came to New York hoping to land a job in a Broadway show and leave burlesque behind her, but now she’s not so sure because she feels a sense of community with her fellow performers. One imdb.com reviewer pleaded with Hollywood not to do a remake of Lady of Burlesque — he was already incensed enough by the remake of Stanwyck’s Christmas in Connecticut with Dyan Cannon (fourth of Cary Grant’s five wives) starring and Arnold Schwarzenegger directing — but a modern-dress version might not actually be a bad idea, especially given that what pass for “strip clubs” nowadays are considerably sleazier than the rather decorous Production Code version of classic burlesque we get here!

The Unauthorized “Beverly Hills, 90210” Story (Lifetime, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Saturday night, on my own, I watched a considerably less exalted show, a movie on Lifetime called The Unauthorized Beverly Hills, 90210 Story. I hadn’t planned on watching this because I never watched Beverly Hills, 90210 when it was new and my previous excursion in watching this sort of fare on Lifetime, The Unauthorized Full House Story, hadn’t been especially stimulating. This one proved to be a bit more interesting, less because of anything to do with the plot — though Shannen Doherty’s (Samantha Munro) meltdown (she was fired at the end of season four for diva-ish behavior, including coming in chronically late or not at all) was effective and well dramatized — than seeing a bunch of cute guys engaging in games of catch and other horse play while not wearing shirts (they were smooth-chested and you could really see their nipples — ah, the benefits of a big-screen TV!). The director was a woman, Vanessa Parise (this on the day the Los Angeles Times published an article on the American Civil Liberties Union filing a formal complaint with the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division about the scandalous under-representation of women as film and TV directors; reportedly just 1.6 percent of feature films made in the U.S. last year were directed by women, and the percentage of TV films and series episodes directed by women was marginally higher but still in the low teens), and she did a good job with Jeffrey Roda’s script (one of the things I like about Lifetime is they’re giving opportunities to women directors, and while not all of them have risen to them, Christine Conradt’s work on The Bride He Bought Online shows her as someone who deserves assignments for theatrical features). Beverly Hills, 90210 was produced by Aaron Spelling, who at the beginning of the show is lamenting that for the first time in 30 years he doesn’t have a TV series on a major network. Two representatives for the newly organized Fox network come to him and ask him to produce a show about teenagers in Beverly Hills. “What do I know about teenagers in Beverly Hills?” he asks — to which the anonymous “suits” reply, “You have two teenage daughters and you live in Beverly Hills.”

The movie cycles through the show’s rough first year, in which Spelling jokes that only “divine intervention” can save it from being canceled — and “divine intervention” of a sort actually happens via the first U.S.-Iraq war, in which the established networks tear up their normal entertainment schedules to cover the war and Fox decides to counter-program by keeping their regular shows on the air and even commissioning more episodes in case the war runs into summer — whereupon Spelling and his show runner/director are told that the kids who watch Beverly Hills, 90210 won’t want to spend their summer watching high school kids in class; instead they’ll want to watch them on summer vacation. They also chart the scandal surrounding the sexual experience written into the script for two of the characters, including Doherty’s, and the way it provokes “moral” reactions because she hasn’t seemed to suffer from the experience. And the show attributes Doherty’s meltdown to her angst at how people who don’t even know her hate her and have her confused with the unsympathetic character she plays on the show — though there’s a brief bit showing her sniffling that suggests within the rules of basic-cable TV that she’s really doing coke. The Unauthorized Beverly Hills, 90210 Story is at least a bit more interesting than The Unauthorized Full House Story — the people on Beverly Hills, 90210 got to do more (including get into more trouble), and at one point the show’s set is depicted as a sort of straight people’s bathhouse in which everyone is “doing” everyone else. Indeed, Lifetime followed the movie with a show whose concept was of such appalling tastelessness it deserves to rank along with their shows about plastic surgeons and little people: a show on which Tori Spelling (played in the movie by Abby Ross), Beverly Hills, 90210 star as well as daughter of the show’s overall producer, was hooked up to a lie detector and asked salacious questions like whether she got her role on the show just because her dad was producing it and whether she lost her virginity for real to one of her co-stars (I was hoping she’d say, “Yes, and you know who it was? Shannen Doherty!”).

The Nazi Plan (U.S. Government, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On September 29 TCM ran the final night of their Five Came Back tribute, based on a recent book by Mark Harris about five American film directors — Frank Capra, John Huston, John Ford, William Wyler, and George Stevens — who enlisted in the U.S. military during World War II and were assigned to make films for the war effort, either documentaries on actual battles, histories of the lead-in to the war or, in Stevens’ case, films showing the aftermath of Nazi rule. The legend of George Stevens’ career is that after establishing himself as a director of romantic comedies — including Alice Adams and Woman of the Year with Katharine Hepburn, Swing Time with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and the film TCM showed just before the war documentaries, The More the Merrier with Jean Arthur and Charles Coburn — as well as the campy adventure-spoof Gunga Din with Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Joan Fontaine in 1939, Stevens was part of the film crew that first documented the horrors of the Nazis’ concentration camps and death centers after the Germans surrendered at long last. Stevens was understandably revolted by what he saw — the dead bodies piled like cordwood and buried in mass graves, the survivors looking like living skeletons — and he insisted on photographing the most horrific scenes himself rather than putting any of his crew through the grim experience. Virtually all the footage of the camps and their victims, living and dead, that gets recycled again and again in virtually every documentary on the Holocaust was shot by Stevens and his crew.

In 1945 his unit, under the authority of producer Ray Kellogg (who gets screen credit on the feature-length film The Nazi Plan even though Stevens does not!), were asked to produce three films to be used in connection with the war-crimes trials of the top Nazi leaders at Nuremberg in southern Germany — a site picked because that had also been the location of the big annual Nazi party conferences, including the 1934 Sixth Party Congress famously filmed by Leni Riefenstahl for her feature-length documentary Triumph of the Will. The films Kellogg’s and Stevens’ unit produced included a 10-minute short called That Justice Be Done, which explained the rationale behind the war-crimes trial and why the Allies were constructing a court, including opportunities for the defendants to testify on their own behalf and be represented by counsel, instead of just taking them out and hanging or shooting them (the way the Russians had actually wanted to do). The person chosen by President Harry Truman to head the court was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (ironically, one of Jackson’s colleagues on the Supreme Court, William O. Douglas, published a critique of the Nuremberg Trials at the time, saying that dress them up in as much of a simulation of due process as you could muster, they were still “victors’ justice” and the charges the Nazis were being tried for, including “waging aggressive war” and “crimes against humanity,” were so vague that under U.S. law they’d be unconstitutional), and the trials went ahead with most of the defendants sentenced to death, though Albert Speer and Rudolf Hess got long prison sentences and the Nazis’ finance minister, Hjalmar Schacht, was acquitted (and paid the sincerest form of flattery, imitation, when Allied countries post-war enacted similar restrictions on exports of their currencies).

TCM’s evening of films made by George Stevens in his capacity as World War II documentarian included That Justice Be Done and the first of two other films he made actually to be used as evidence against the Nazi bigwigs during the Nuremberg trials. The one they showed last night was a two-hour documentary called The Nazi Plan, which was essentially a history of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist movement from 1923 — the year Hitler’s first attempt at seizing power, the Beer Hall Putsch, failed — to 1944, the year the attempt to assassinate him failed and Hitler made a series of public appearances that were filmed and shown to the German people to prove he was alive, well, and committed to continuing Germany’s life-or-death struggle. The one they blessedly didn’t show was The Nazi Concentration Camps, a one-hour compilation of Stevens’ and his crew’s own footage of the Nazi death centers as the Allied forces opened them during the latter stages of the war and the horrific scenes within them were first seen by people who were neither victims nor perpetrators of the Holocaust. (There were a few bits of that footage in the short That Justice Be Done, including a shot of the famous entry to the mass gas chambers which innocuously labeled them “showers” so the people entering wouldn’t know they were about to die within minutes.) The point of The Nazi Plan was to establish that the Nazis not only committed genocide but planned to do so from the get-go, from the earliest days of their movement — and Mark Miller, whose book Five Came Back was the basis for this series of showings on TCM, explained that when The Nazi Plan was shown in the courtroom at Nuremberg the Nazis on trial reacted with pride, without any sense of remorse or shame, glad that the movie had shown them and the goals of their movement as they wanted them seen and sure that they and their works would be vindicated in their so-called “trial.” When The Nazi Concentration Camps was shown, they were equally unrepentant but also aware that the rest of the world (especially representatives of the countries that had spent so many lives and so much money to defeat them) wouldn’t see these things the way they had and therefore their cause was doomed and they were going to hang for what they had done.

The Nazi Plan was made entirely from captured German film, and a series of intertitles at the beginning (including a long letter from the general who’d been in command of the unit that had made it) assured us that everything we were seeing and hearing had been authentic except for the voice-over English translations of the German leaders’ words as shown in the clips — and even those were as honest as they could be made. The initial clips are silent — the evidentiary nature of the documentary precluded adding sound effects the way documentarians would if they were making a film for entertainment or education, not courtroom evidence — and it’s only when we get closer to the Nazis’ takeover of power in Germany on January 30, 1933 that the films not only acquire sound but are clearly professionally made by people with state-of-the-art equipment and ample production budgets to make us see the Nazis the way they wanted us to see them. Leni Riefenstahl’s films make up a good portion of the compilation — not only Triumph of the Will (made at the 1934 Nazi party conference in Nuremberg) but also Victory Through Faith (a half-hour short from the 1933 conference quickly withdrawn from circulation after Hitler ordered the purge of Ernst Röhm, the Gay officer he had put in charge of the Sturm-Abteilung, or SA, storm troopers, along with Röhm’s associates and the Strasser brothers and other Left-wing Nazis who took the “socialist” in their movement’s name seriously and called for a “second revolution” that would overthrow Germany’s military and corporate establishments — which was about the last thing Hitler wanted because he realized the only chance he’d have of winning the world war he intended to start was with the established German military and the existing corporate infrastructure to produce arms for it) and Day of Freedom, which Riefenstahl shot in 1935 and which showed the German military on parade, because the day they had been shown at the 1934 Nuremberg event had been too cloudy for good filmmaking and therefore they weren’t included in Triumph of the Will.

Most of the rest of the movie was produced by the Deutsche Woschenschau, the “German Weekly Newsreel,” whose makers, while not at Riefenstahl’s talent level, worked similarly to exalt the German military and its traditions, as well as the Nazi movement in general, and produced a product that has been called considerably more artistic and effective as propaganda than its Allied counterparts. The Woschenschau crews went out with Germany’s armed forces and photographed the battles as they were going on (as did similar crews for Germany’s enemies), making movies like Campaign in Poland and Baptism of Fire (the latter another film about the Polish conquest made after Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command and also the head of the Luftwaffe, Germany’s air force, complained that the importance of the air battle in destroying Poland’s will to resist had been short-changed in Campaign in Poland), as well as their final movie, Traitors Before the People’s Court. This was an account of the trials of the plotters who attempted to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944 and was dominated by Roland Friesler, the judge Hitler assigned to conduct the one-sided show trials — only when the film was released Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels ordered it pulled because the defendants were coming off with far more dignity than the crazy Friesler (who in the clips shown in The Nazi Plan seems to be a prototype of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the other post-war inquisitors in the U.S. Congress who badgered witnesses they suspected of being Communists in similar fashion). Just as Goebbels was taking the Traitors film out of release, the trials themselves came to an abrupt end when a British bombing raid on Berlin scored a direct hit on the courthouse and killed Friesler and everyone else in the room at the time.

The Nazi Plan is in a way more powerful than some of the more openly propagandistic anti-Nazi documentaries about Nazism that have been made since precisely because of its restraint, as well as the knowledge — inseparable from the experience if you see Triumph of the Will “complete” — that we are seeing the Nazis as they wanted us to see them. These outrageously regimented shots of virtually indistinguishable people marching in military formation (whether they were actually in the military or not — one scene from Triumph of the Will included here depicts what Hitler called the “German Labor Battalion,” a group of young men marching and distinguishable from the actual military only in that they’re carrying shovels instead of rifles, though they’re still holding and manipulating them in classic military fashion), which the Nazis were presenting as evidence of how their rule had pulled Germany out of the partisan disunity of the Weimar Republic and united the nation into a common sense of purpose that would prove unbeatable are oppressive enough on the surface — when I first saw Triumph of the Will I described it as “Hell, as choreographed by Busby Berkeley” — and even more oppressive when you realize that this was the Nazis’ dream of perfection, the ideal society they were killing all the Jews, Communists, Gypsies and Queers to achieve. The Nazi Plan is chilling enough on its surface, but it’s even scarier in context — Dwight MacDonald once said that Triumph of the Will showed more of the evil of Nazism, even though Riefenstahl’s conscious intent was to glorify it, than the “properly” anti-Nazi documentary Mein Kampf (1963) because “the equation works out differently, since we put a minus where she puts a plus, but because she’s an artist she can’t help clarifying.”

Planet Outlaws (Universal, 1938; Sherman S. Krellberg, 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Nazi Plan Charles came home and we ran a considerably lighter movie — though, intriguingly, not without its points of similarity — Planet Outlaws, a 1953 release from Sherman S. Krellberg, one of the slimier bottom-feeders of the movie business, who grabbed the re-release rights to Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe once tax issues forced Capra and his screenwriter and business partner, Robert Riskin, to liquidate their company following its initial release by Warner Bros. in 1941. Doubtless Krellberg loved getting his hands on a major movie with a major director and major stars (Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward Arnold) given that his own productions were generally things like the truly bizarre 1935 serial The Lost City, a sort of Flash Gordon knock-off — except the “lost city” from which the dastardly villain Zadok (William “Stage” Boyd, the scapegrace actor whose off-screen antics with alcohol, drugs and women once cost his near-namesake, William Boyd, a major-studio contract when his bosses, getting their William Boyds mixed up, invoked the morals clause and fired him — whereupon William Boyd went to court and sued the other William Boyd, and the settlement included the stipulation that the other William Boyd, the one that wasn’t playing Hopalong Cassidy in a long-running series of “B” Westerns at Paramount, bill himself as William “Stage” Boyd in his subsequent movies — of which The Lost City was the only one since while it was still in post-production “Stage” Boyd’s bad habits caught up to him and he died in his 40’s) attempts to conquer the world isn’t on another planet but is in Africa. Anyway, in 1953 Krellberg bought the rights to the 1938 Universal serial Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century, produced as a follow-up to the three Flash Gordon serials they’d made with former Olympic swimming star Larry “Buster” Crabbe in the title role. Crabbe returned for the 1938 Buck Rogers with the Flash Gordon team of Ford Beebe and Saul Goodkind directing, and Constance Moore took Jean Parker’s place as his female lead, Wilma Deering, who for once actually has something to do besides just get herself in mortal jeopardy and set up the cliffhangers. She’s actually the lieutenant on Rogers’ spaceship, which crash-lands in the Arctic in 1938, which puts the crew on board — Buck, Wilma and the (alas) obligatory boy sidekick, George “Buddy” Wade (Jackie Moran, though less oppressive than usual since he’s obviously teenage instead of pre-pubescent) — in suspended animation until they’re discovered and reawakened five hundred years later. Five hundred years later Earth is under the dominion of gangster “Killer” Kane (Anthony Warde) — though fortunately Buck, Wilma and Buddy were discovered not by Kane’s forces but by the handful of good guys left, including “scientist-general” Dr. Huer (C. Montague Shaw) and the small community he governs who live underground but are plotting to stage a revolution, take over the Earth and restore law and order.

In order to do this they have to send an emissary to the planet Saturn, since only with the Saturnians as allies can the good Earth people hope to defeat “Killer” Kane and his thugs. Of course Buck Rogers volunteers to be the Earth emissary — only a crew from Kane’s government arrives at the same time and the Saturnians are unable to decide whether to throw in their lot with Kane’s forces or with the underground regime of Dr. Huer. Saturnian Prince Tallen (the marvelous Chinese-American actor Philip Ahn, who especially once the U.S. got involved in World War II usually found himself playing Japanese villains but at least once got a solid good-guy role as an FBI agent alongside Anna May Wong in the 1937 Paramount “B” Daughter of Shanghai) volunteers to return to Earth to figure out who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and once he gets a look at what “Killer” Kane does to people who cross him in any way — he forces them to wear helmets that turn them into “robots,” not mechanical creatures but mindless slaves (the sorts of people who were called “zombies” in films until George Romero dramatically redefined the term “zombie” in his 1968 cheapie Night of the Living Dead and gave “zombies” its current meaning of radioactively altered humans who survive by eating other people’s brains) — naturally he throws in with Huer, Buck and the good guys. The task of editing a serial to feature-length running time was always problematic; Republic usually did it with some flair but the people who got hold of the reissue rights to other companies’ serials couldn’t have been bothered; with even less exposition than existed in the original, Planet Outlaws just lurches from cliffhanger to cliffhanger and even the good points, the performances of Constance Moore and Philip Ahn and the athleticism of Buster Crabbe (in one quite nice scene he gets himself from place to place by grabbing a conveniently hanging rope and swinging across the room, a forerunner of his future playing Tarzan knockoff “Jungle Jim”), somewhat get lost in the shuffle. But watching this right after The Nazi Plan certainly emphasized that in 1938 both Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin were alive, well and at or close to the peaks of their powers, so a movie about a future Earth governed by a mad dictator with the morals (or lack thereof) of a gangster wasn’t just the stuff of science-fiction nightmares but a quite real possibility — and though by 1953 Hitler was dead and Stalin was on his way out, Sherman S. Krellberg shot a new prologue and epilogue to Planet Outlaws with a speaker explaining that the takeover of the world by dire (albeit unspecified) “enemies” was a real possibility and one we needed to be willing to fight, with the heroism of the characters in the main film as our example.

Five and Ten (MGM, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The TCM showing I watched September 28 was a quirky 1931 movie called Five and Ten — released by MGM and billed as “A Marion Davies Production” (which in practice probably meant a William Randolph Hearst production, though why it was billed under her name when Hearst’s standard practice was to list the films he produced and financed as “Cosmopolitan Pictures” is a mystery), based on a book by Fannie Hurst and directed by Robert Z. Leonard (a mostly reliable hack who made one truly great film in his long career, the 1937 Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy masterpiece Maytime) from a script by A. P. Younger (“adaptation”) and Edith Fitzgerald (“dialogue continuity”). One would think that a modern-dress Marion Davies movie called Five and Ten (actually five and ten — the main title, unusually for 1931, lists the film’s name in all lower-case letters) would cast her as a working-class girl eking out a living as a clerk at a five- and ten-cent store and meeting a rich man, falling for him and trying to make the relationship work in spite of the class differences. Instead it’s a story about the Rarick family, who opened a chain of five- and ten-cent stores that through mergers and acquisitions has become the dominant low-end retailer through most of the country and is negotiating to buy a Pacific Northwest chain that will give it reach throughout the U.S. The problem is that the chain’s founder, John Rarick (Richard Bennett), has become so wrapped up in his business that he’s neglected the rest of his family, whom he has just moved from Kansas City (where his stores first started) to New York. His wife Jenny (Irene Rich) is secretly dating a gold-digging gigolo named Ramon (Theodore von Eltz) — we barely see him but we can tell just from the pencil-thin moustache he wears and the prissy notes he writes her that he’s up to no good — while his son Avery (Kent Douglass, who later became Douglass Montgomery — not much of an improvement) is a wastrel whom dad somehow thinks he can whip into shape as a suitable heir to take over the stores when he finally retires or croaks. (There’s a nice bit of “pre-Code” cheekiness in how we — though not John — learn that his wife is cheating on him; just as John is dictating to an official biographer and insisting that success hasn’t changed either him or his family at all, Jenny receives a note from Ramon telling her to come to him or “I will be very disappointed.”) John’s daughter Jennifer (Marion Davies) seems like the most sensible one of the bunch, but she’s got her own obsessions: like her mom, she’s determined to have New York’s old-money society accept the Raricks as equals instead of writing them off as Midwestern parvenus. So it’s yet another story of the clash between old money and new — a conflict which rings false to modern-day audiences accustomed to worshiping anyone with money, no matter how (or how recently) obtained; as I noted in my comments on the most recent version of The Great Gatsby, the old money-new money clash at the heart of that story, and the element of it I think meant the most emotionally to its creator, F. Scott Fitzgerald (whose real-life relationship with Zelda Sayre was largely the model for Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan), was the part modern audiences were least likely to relate to.

Jennifer weasels a $5,000 check out of her dad to contribute to a charity ball — “What’s the charity?” he asks, and she doesn’t know — and at the ball she meets and immediately falls for aspiring, but not too aspiring, architect Berry Rhodes (Leslie Howard). Rhodes is a well-to-do young man with a penchant for partying and women, but he’s about to settle down and make a socially advantageous marriage with Muriel Preston (Mary Duncan) — only once he lays eyes on Our Marion he’s smitten. He rather obliquely offers to make Jennifer his mistress once he ties the knot with Muriel, but Jennifer virtuously insists that she’s not going to be satisfied with a part-time relationship with a man married to someone else (dialogue that’s almost unbearably ironic coming from William Randolph Hearst’s long-time mistress!). She decides to make him a success by getting her dad to commission him to design the huge Rarick Tower he plans to erect in New York, and when dad protests that he’s already given the job to an established architectural firm, she insists that they partner with Rhodes on the design. There seems to be some uncertainty as to what Rhodes’ first name is, because when he finally gets married to Muriel he’s addressed throughout the ceremony as “Benedict,” of all things. Rhodes gets the job and, on the night the building is scheduled to open, sneaks in and takes his own private tour to see if the established architects used any of his design. He and Jennifer end up locked in for the night in the observation room at the top of the building, and while nothing Code-threatening happens it’s enough to create a scandal. In a pretty preposterous scene Muriel shows up to John Rarick’s home and says that if he gives her $100,000 she’ll divorce Berry and Jennifer can have him — only Jennifer herself hears what’s going on, grabs the check from her dad’s hand and tears him up, saying she’s not going to have her dad buy her a husband. Meanwhile, Jenny (Jennifer’s mom, remember?) finally gets tired of being ignored by her business-obsessed husband and writes him a note that she’s leaving him because she’s lonely — only the note is intercepted by son Avery, who, having already got plastered on his dad’s brandy when he discovered his mom was having an affair, responds to his mom’s decision to leave his dad by taking up his airplane and deliberately crashing it. (Until this scene we’ve had no idea Avery had a plane or any interest in flying, which in their post-film commentary Ben Mankiewicz and Leonard Maltin cited as an example of the narrative economy of 1930’s films. Today plot points like that get over-explained — though two years later the makers of the marvelous 1933 film Sensation Hunters also had a rich character die in a plane crash, either a suicide or a drunken accident, and that story by Whitman Chambers did carefully “plant” that the character was interested in aviation.) Though Avery doesn’t die immediately, he ends up in the hospital in critical condition and lasts just long enough to see his family reunited — mom thinks better of the gold-digging gigolo, dad cuts back on his business activities and agrees to a vacation, and Jennifer gets a note from Berry telling her that Muriel is in Reno getting a divorce and therefore they’ll soon be together.

Five and Ten is an intriguing movie, compelling in some ways and flat and ordinary in others; Marion Davies’ performance is quite competent (though I found myself wondering through much of it how the young Katharine Hepburn might have fared in the role; whereas Kate would have been edgy and Barbara Stanwyck heartbreaking, Davies is believable but not emotionally stirring) and she and Leslie Howard have real chemistry together. One big-time irony is the casting of Richard Bennett (father of Constance and Joan Bennett) as Davies’ father; needless to say, Mankiewicz (whose family has an Orson Welles connection since Herman J. Mankiewicz co-wrote the script for Citizen Kane) and Maltin couldn’t help but mention in their introduction to the film that Marion Davies was really quite a good actress in the right sorts of parts. Various versions of how the character of Susan Alexander Kane came to be exist, but the one they told before screening Five and Ten was that Orson Welles had deliberately made his character completely untalented so people wouldn’t think he was modeling her on Marion Davies (and he had a real-life model in mind, too: Ganna Walska, a would-be diva helped to an opera career she didn’t deserve by her sugar daddy — there’s a memo from Welles to his music director, Bernard Herrmann, not to make Susan Alexander’s voice sound utterly terrible because “even ‘G.W.’ had something of a voice”). Instead people thought the character was Marion Davies, and since there are a lot more people who’ve seen Citizen Kane than have ever seen a Davies film start-to-finish, the impression has persisted that Marion Davies had no talent and got slogged through a series of inept and money-losing films because her boyfriend had money. The irony involving Richard Bennett playing her father is that he had a Welles connection; his last film, made when he (like the character he was playing) was fatally ill, was as old Major Amberson in The Magnificent Ambersons! The basic problem with Five and Ten isn’t the acting or Leonard’s hacky but serviceable direction; it’s the story itself, one of Fannie Hurst’s big worm-turning tales that simply isn’t interesting until she really piles on the miseries for the Rarick family in the final reels and the tale finally achieves some emotional depth — too late for the viewer, though, as it is too late for Avery Rarick!