by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I was interested in the September 2, 2010 BBC Proms telecast because I’d been searching the Internet for recordings of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition — both of the original piano version and of orchestrations other than the famous (and familiar) one by Ravel — since Monday night, when Charles and I went to the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park and heard former San Diego civic organist Robert Plimpton and percussionist Jason Ginter do the complete Pictures in an arrangement of their own, which I’d assumed would be basically an organ version with percussion commentary and instead was a true dialogue between the organ and the assortment of percussion instruments (including vibraphone and bells) Ginter played. I’ve never liked the Ravel orchestration of Pictures — I love Mussorgsky and I love Ravel, but their sound worlds simply don’t mesh; Mussorgsky’s is bold, striking, almost black-and-white and very Russian, while Ravel’s is subtle, sensual, colorful and very French (down to his use of a saxophone — a French invention — to state the principal melody of the “Old Castle” movement).
When I heard Leopold Stokowski’s orchestration — both in an early-1940’s recording conducted by him and a recent one on Naxos by his protégé, José Serebrier — I thought, “That is what Pictures at an Exhibition should sound like as an orchestral piece.” Rooting around on the Net I was able to run across a performance of the piano version by Rudolf Firkúsny from 1957 (not as much of an energy rush as Horowitz’s or Richter’s, but still great stuff and confirmation that the best way to hear Pictures is still as the solo piano piece Mussorgsky wrote) and a Cleveland Orchestra concert conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy as well as a video of this Proms concert featuring the orchestration — actually done before Ravel’s — by Sir Henry J. Wood, who founded the Proms concerts in the first place. Wood was one of those classical musicians obsessed with broadening the audience for his art and doing that by bringing it to new venues; he would do orchestral concerts on beachfront promenades, and from this the concept of “the Proms” was born even though they’re now held in respectable — and enclosed — traditional classical venues like the Royal Albert Hall. Wood was also the first major conductor to sign a recording contract, with British Columbia in 1911, and while his early records were severely cut versions of masterpieces to fit within the 4 ½-minute limitation of a 12-inch 78 rpm record side, they did fulfill his intent to bring his music to a wider audience and they also established a market for classical instrumental records, which later led to the recording of complete symphonies, including some which Wood conducted.
I was wondering when they were going to slot in Wood’s orchestration of Pictures since it still hadn’t been played when the two-hour video had only half an hour to run — and it turned out the way they were able to squeeze it in during the remaining running time was because Wood had left out all the transitory “Promenade” sections (meant to represent the viewer at the exhibition — a memorial to Mussorgsky’s late friend Victor Hartmann, who was really an architect and a designer rather than a fine artist — walking from work to work) except the opening one. Wood’s orchestration was interesting in its heavy reliance on the brass, sometimes overly so — the “Bydlo” movement didn’t sound like one ox-drawn cart being driven through the streets of a primitive village, but like the entire Russian army marching off to the front — and its refusal to spotlight individual players; there were a few brief solos for one instrument or another, but none of the concerto-like writing in much of Ravel’s. At that I found myself liking Wood’s version a good deal better than Ashkenazy’s, even though I’d expected that Ashkenazy would have two legs up on anyone else orchestrating Pictures — he’s Russian and in addition to being a conductor he’s also a top-level concert pianist (in fact, he established himself as a pianist long before he started conducting) who had had Pictures in his piano repertoire. Indeed, I think Ashkenazy is the only person who has ever recorded Pictures as both a pianist and a conductor — but his arrangement seems thick and heavy, relatively uninteresting and lacking either the color of Ravel’s (as wrong as I think it is!) or the almost Rite of Spring-ish primitivism of Stokowski’s.
As for Wood’s, it’s quite a capable piece of work even though it’s clearly a product of its time (the early 1910’s); it’s not as good as Stokowski’s arrangement, which strikes me as far superior to Ravel’s and much more “Mussorgskian” — certainly much more Russian-sounding, which for a nationalist composer like Mussorgsky is all to the good — and Wood’s suffers from his bizarre decision to omit all the “Promenade” movements but the first one, but it’s still worth hearing and a blessed antidote to the paintbox colors Ravel stuck on the piece, which makes about as much sense as an orchestral realization of Mussorgsky’s sound world as the colorized version of Picasso’s “Guernica” produced by Matisse’s great-granddaughter as a mash-up of Picasso’s and Matisse’s styles (I’m not making this up, you know!) does as a realization of Picasso’s intent to use the black-and-white medium to show the horrors of war. It’s certainly better than the heavy, sluggish, ghastly arrangements Wood came up with of Baroque pieces like Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 and Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks. (I think the “historically informed performance” movement has set up an almost dictatorial set of expectations of how Bach and other composers of his era should be played — I think the two Naxos CD’s of pianists of the 1920’s and 1930’s playing Bach and feeling free to interpret him the way they would Beethoven or Chopin or Liszt are utterly fascinating and a refreshing antidote to “historical performance” fascism — but the sludgy performances of Baroque orchestral works Wood and other conductors of his generation gave were indications of what the “historically informed” crowd were rebelling against.)
The September 2, 2010 Proms concert was conducted by François-Xavier Roth (his last name pronounced like the English word “wrought”), who was French and spoke with a thick French accent in the inevitable mid-concert interviews (which, as usual, reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s description of one of the characters in a play of his as managing “to state the obvious with a sense of real discovery”), and all the other music was French (which makes me wonder why he didn’t program Ravel’s arrangement of Pictures instead of Henry Wood’s — probably a tie-in because Wood was the founder of the Proms concerts). There was a lot of announcers’ (and musicians’ — one of the most bizarre developments in the telecasting of classical music is that performers are now expected to sit for interviews during the intermissions, right after they’ve finished playing often difficult pieces, and babble away like athletes during halftime of the big game) jabber about how the first composer represented, Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764, which makes him a contemporary of J. S. Bach), moved from the provinces to Paris at age 50 and suddenly took the world of French opera by storm; while the second one, Joseph Canteloube (1879-1957), started out as a Parisian cosmopolitan and gained fame and his market niche by recasting the folk songs of the Auvergne region of southern France into “classical” scores. (Actually, according to his Wikipedia page, Canteloube was born in the Auvergne region, in the town of Annonay, and was bilingual in French and Occitan, the Auvergne dialect in which the famous songs are written.)
Xavier-Roth clearly had fun with the Rameau work, an instrumental suite from the opera Dardanus, which he conducted with one hand while beating a large drum with the other — which, given that all the works were in dance tempi, actually made sense and added to the fun of the concept. He joked about the similarity of what he was doing to a rock concert, and indeed there were some musical similarities as well: Rameau’s music has a strong beat and was written in dance beats, and the second movement of the suite even had a call-and-response section between parts of the orchestra. The assortment of songs from Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne which followed were sung by Anna Caterina Antonacci and focused more on the first two books than any of the later ones (Canteloube published the first of his five volumes of Chants d’Auvergne in 1924 and his last in 1955 (and if you listen to the album of Natania Davrath singing all of them, in sequence — beautifully — you’ll get the distinct impression that he was draining the well pretty dry towards the end). Antonacci faces some stiff competition in these songs — recordings in my collection include the pioneering 1930’s set with Madeleine Grey, the complete set with Davrath and an engaging selection by Kiri te Kanawa — and she didn’t quite make the songs as magical as those three singers did but she did communicate them effectively (despite the oddness of the language — at least the word “amour” in Occitan is the same as in French!).
I’ve noted elsewhere that I think Les Baxter’s scores for Yma Sumac’s first album, Voice of the Xtabay, are every bit as good as the Chants d’Auvergne in terms of taking folk material and turning it into “classical music” — and if Voice of the Xtabay weren’t so vocally challenging (Sumac reportedly had a five-octave range and Baxter’s arrangements were designed to showcase all of it) it might well have gained a similar place in the repertoire by now. After that Xavier-Roth presented the British premiere of a work by a modern French composer, Martin Matalon: Lignes de fuite, which translates as “Converging Lines.” I wouldn’t exactly call it one of those modern classical pieces whose composer runs away, kicking and screaming, whenever he comes up with anything that sounds remotely like a melody (a line from our friend, and former Los Angeles Times music critic, Ken Herman); I’d say Matalon is simply uninterested in either creating or avoiding a sense of melody. The piece really does sound like converging lines, and at eight minutes I probably would have liked it; unfortunately, it kept going annoyingly for 10 minutes more than that, and given that Matalon’s musical style (at least as heard here) doesn’t allow for the piece to build to any kind of climax, your only clue that it was about to end was that it started getting softer and slower.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Monday, August 8, 2011
Journal of a Crime (Warners as “First National,” 1934)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Journal of a Crime, a really odd production from 1934 by Warner Bros. in “First National” drag, which on the surface is a typical Ruth Chatterton soap opera that allowed her to suffer nobly and picturesquely, but turns out to have a surprisingly “European” flair. Not only does it take place in Paris (albeit a never-never Paris in which everybody speaks unaccented English — despite the presence of a card-carrying Frenchman, Adolphe Menjou, as the male lead), but it’s based on a film by Jacques Deval (at least that’s what the American Film Institute Catalog says; the actual on-screen credits say Deval’s work was a play) called La Vie Perdue (“The Lost Life”) and filmed under the working title Silence de Mort (“Silence of Death”) and the movie has a visual richness and almost noir-ish chiaroscuro look not at all what we’d expect from a film by William Keighley (pronounced “KEE-lee”), a quite ordinary Warners hack.
While I was watching it I wondered if perhaps William Dieterle had ghost-directed any or all of it — the film was drenched in the visual atmospherics that would have been second nature to Dieterle, with his apprenticeship as actor and director in his native Germany — though according to the AFI Catalog this project was originally intended for an even more illustrious German director than Dieterle: G. W. Pabst, who had fled the Nazis in 1933 and had settled in France, then a year later decided to try his luck in Hollywood and signed with Warners. He made one movie, A Modern Hero, and then was announced for this project — only to be let go when A Modern Hero was a box-office disappointment. Still, I can’t help but wonder if he worked on Journal of a Crime long enough to storyboard it, because even with a stylish “glamour” cameraman like Ernest Haller I can’t imagine Keighley having this much of a visual flair without some sort of help.
The film opens with a mysterious woman waiting outside a closed theatre on a cold night — both someone from the theatre and a police officer ask her if she wouldn’t rather wait inside, but she refuses and says she’s fine (she’s fine). It turns out she’s Françoise Mollet (Ruth Chatterton), whose husband Paul Mollet (Adolphe Menjou) wrote the musical that’s being rehearsed in the theatre for an opening two days hence. Paul has a major reputation as a womanizer (well, he’s an Adolphe Menjou lead — what do you expect?) and his current main extramarital flame is Odette Florey (Claire Dodd), the leading lady of his show. Paul and Odette have an argument outside the theatre, with Paul pleading his undying love (yeah, right) and Odette insisting that she’s had it with him and she won’t continue to date him until he starts divorce proceedings so he can free himself of his current wife and marry her. Of course, Françoise hears all of this, then sees the two of them get in the same car together; she goes home and waits up for Paul, who finally arrives at 3 a.m. with the scent of another woman’s powder on his coat (odd to see that gimmick used seriously the night after we’d seen it in a comic context in The Fuller Brush Girl!).
The next day Françoise sneaks into the theatre with a gun she got from Paul’s end-table drawer and shoots her — only just then the film cuts to a bank that is being robbed by a lone gunman, Costelli (Noel Madison). The teller has a gun behind his desk and tries to get it out and shoot Costelli, but Costelli shoots first and the teller dies. Costelli flees into the theatre and tries to hide out there but is cornered by the cops, and eventually he is convicted not only of the teller’s murder but Odette’s as well and sentenced to the guillotine. Before he dies Françoise visits him in prison and offers to confess to Odette’s murder, but since he’s going to be put to death for the one he did commit he gallantly agrees to take the fall for her for the one he didn’t as well. He’s duly executed, only Françoise is still tormented by guilt and is on her way to confess to the police when she sees a child in the street about to be struck down by a car. She goes into the street to try to rescue the child; she does, but the car hits her. She doesn’t die, but she develops amnesia and Paul is told that she’s forgotten everything she ever knew, including such simple things as how to use flatware to eat and how to read or write. (Amnesia is such a compelling plot gimmick it’s far more common in movies than in real life, but I’ve heard of people who’ve been through heart attacks having this problem, especially if the flow of oxygen to the brain was cut off for more than a split second.)
Even for the cusp of the so-called “pre-Code” era (this was made in November 1933, copyright in March 1934 and released on April 10) this is a pretty nervy ending — apparently the loss of any memory of the murder (or much of anything else) and the struggle she’s going to have to go through to function as a normal member of society again constituted enough “redemption through suffering” to satisfy the Code office even in its less influential pre-Legion of Decency phase. Journal of a Crime suffers from Chatterton’s oddly stagy acting — many of the scenes in the F. Hugh Herbert/Charles Kenyon script require her to hold the stage in silent action, and she’s quite good except that one can see the calculation behind almost every move and gesture; she’s obviously playing these scenes the way she would have on stage and one aches at the thought of what the younger and less stage-bound Bette Davis could have done with this part. But the plot is so compelling (albeit far-fetched) and the overall atmosphere so good it really doesn’t matter how stylized the star’s acting is (and confronted with the relative naturalism of the Warners stock company Chatterton seems even stagier than she would otherwise!); Journal of a Crime is a decidedly odd movie but also a quite good one and well worth watching.
The film was Journal of a Crime, a really odd production from 1934 by Warner Bros. in “First National” drag, which on the surface is a typical Ruth Chatterton soap opera that allowed her to suffer nobly and picturesquely, but turns out to have a surprisingly “European” flair. Not only does it take place in Paris (albeit a never-never Paris in which everybody speaks unaccented English — despite the presence of a card-carrying Frenchman, Adolphe Menjou, as the male lead), but it’s based on a film by Jacques Deval (at least that’s what the American Film Institute Catalog says; the actual on-screen credits say Deval’s work was a play) called La Vie Perdue (“The Lost Life”) and filmed under the working title Silence de Mort (“Silence of Death”) and the movie has a visual richness and almost noir-ish chiaroscuro look not at all what we’d expect from a film by William Keighley (pronounced “KEE-lee”), a quite ordinary Warners hack.
While I was watching it I wondered if perhaps William Dieterle had ghost-directed any or all of it — the film was drenched in the visual atmospherics that would have been second nature to Dieterle, with his apprenticeship as actor and director in his native Germany — though according to the AFI Catalog this project was originally intended for an even more illustrious German director than Dieterle: G. W. Pabst, who had fled the Nazis in 1933 and had settled in France, then a year later decided to try his luck in Hollywood and signed with Warners. He made one movie, A Modern Hero, and then was announced for this project — only to be let go when A Modern Hero was a box-office disappointment. Still, I can’t help but wonder if he worked on Journal of a Crime long enough to storyboard it, because even with a stylish “glamour” cameraman like Ernest Haller I can’t imagine Keighley having this much of a visual flair without some sort of help.
The film opens with a mysterious woman waiting outside a closed theatre on a cold night — both someone from the theatre and a police officer ask her if she wouldn’t rather wait inside, but she refuses and says she’s fine (she’s fine). It turns out she’s Françoise Mollet (Ruth Chatterton), whose husband Paul Mollet (Adolphe Menjou) wrote the musical that’s being rehearsed in the theatre for an opening two days hence. Paul has a major reputation as a womanizer (well, he’s an Adolphe Menjou lead — what do you expect?) and his current main extramarital flame is Odette Florey (Claire Dodd), the leading lady of his show. Paul and Odette have an argument outside the theatre, with Paul pleading his undying love (yeah, right) and Odette insisting that she’s had it with him and she won’t continue to date him until he starts divorce proceedings so he can free himself of his current wife and marry her. Of course, Françoise hears all of this, then sees the two of them get in the same car together; she goes home and waits up for Paul, who finally arrives at 3 a.m. with the scent of another woman’s powder on his coat (odd to see that gimmick used seriously the night after we’d seen it in a comic context in The Fuller Brush Girl!).
The next day Françoise sneaks into the theatre with a gun she got from Paul’s end-table drawer and shoots her — only just then the film cuts to a bank that is being robbed by a lone gunman, Costelli (Noel Madison). The teller has a gun behind his desk and tries to get it out and shoot Costelli, but Costelli shoots first and the teller dies. Costelli flees into the theatre and tries to hide out there but is cornered by the cops, and eventually he is convicted not only of the teller’s murder but Odette’s as well and sentenced to the guillotine. Before he dies Françoise visits him in prison and offers to confess to Odette’s murder, but since he’s going to be put to death for the one he did commit he gallantly agrees to take the fall for her for the one he didn’t as well. He’s duly executed, only Françoise is still tormented by guilt and is on her way to confess to the police when she sees a child in the street about to be struck down by a car. She goes into the street to try to rescue the child; she does, but the car hits her. She doesn’t die, but she develops amnesia and Paul is told that she’s forgotten everything she ever knew, including such simple things as how to use flatware to eat and how to read or write. (Amnesia is such a compelling plot gimmick it’s far more common in movies than in real life, but I’ve heard of people who’ve been through heart attacks having this problem, especially if the flow of oxygen to the brain was cut off for more than a split second.)
Even for the cusp of the so-called “pre-Code” era (this was made in November 1933, copyright in March 1934 and released on April 10) this is a pretty nervy ending — apparently the loss of any memory of the murder (or much of anything else) and the struggle she’s going to have to go through to function as a normal member of society again constituted enough “redemption through suffering” to satisfy the Code office even in its less influential pre-Legion of Decency phase. Journal of a Crime suffers from Chatterton’s oddly stagy acting — many of the scenes in the F. Hugh Herbert/Charles Kenyon script require her to hold the stage in silent action, and she’s quite good except that one can see the calculation behind almost every move and gesture; she’s obviously playing these scenes the way she would have on stage and one aches at the thought of what the younger and less stage-bound Bette Davis could have done with this part. But the plot is so compelling (albeit far-fetched) and the overall atmosphere so good it really doesn’t matter how stylized the star’s acting is (and confronted with the relative naturalism of the Warners stock company Chatterton seems even stagier than she would otherwise!); Journal of a Crime is a decidedly odd movie but also a quite good one and well worth watching.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
The Fuller Brush Girl (Columbia, 1950)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Fuller Brush Girl, a 1950 comic romp for Lucille Ball that Turner Classic Movies had shown earlier yesterday as part of a tribute to Ball on what would have been her 100th birthday. Though Lucille Ball had actually played a wide variety of roles in her film career — including out-and-out bitches in Dance, Girl, Dance and The Big Street and quite capable noir heroines in The Dark Corner, Lured and the 1949 Easy Living — and when she had done comedy it had generally been romantic comedy rather than slapstick, when she signed a three-film contract with Columbia in 1948 Harry Cohn had the idea that she could be a great physical comedienne. The result was two films, Miss Grant Takes Richmond and this one, that are almost beta versions of I Love Lucy — they cast Ball as a ditzy comedienne whose madcap schemes to get ahead get her and her loved one in plenty of trouble, and they’re light-hearted films that make you roar with laughter.
Miss Grant Takes Richmond seems stuck on the cusp between romantic comedy and slapstick — it’s a meeting-of-opposites plot between aspiring secretary Ball and bookie William Holden, and its resolution is that Ball not only lands Holden but persuades him he can make more money as a real-estate developer (the “cover” business for his bookie joint) than he can as a crook. (No comment on the thin, to say the least, distinction between real-estate developers and crooks.) The Fuller Brush Girl is considerably more relentless, and for that I think we have to thank screenwriter Frank Tashlin, who had a quite remarkable career trajectory. As a kid he’d watched the Laurel and Hardy movies almost religiously, and his first important job in movies came as a gag man for the Warner Bros. cartoon series — for which he raided his childhood memories of Laurel and Hardy and the other great live-action comedians he’d seen. When he started working on live-action films himself he brought along the sensibility he’d honed in cartoons and delighted in creating “cartoony” gags that were relatively easy to do with pen and paper but in live-action required some elaborate special-effects work.
He made his reputation on the Marx Brothers’ film A Night in Casablanca, for which he wrote the opening sequence that’s still the biggest thing anyone remembers about that movie: a cop spots Harpo Marx leaning against a building and asks him, voice dripping with sarcasm, “What are you doing — holding up the building?” The cop drags Harpo away from the building — and it falls; he really was holding it up! I suspect Tashlin was responsible for the more spectacular slapstick gags in Miss Grant Takes Richmond — particularly Ball’s great battle with a power shovel — and here, instead of sharing the writing credits with brothers Everett and Devery Freeman and Nat Perrin (also an ex-Marx Brothers writer), Tashlin got to do the screenplay all by himself. His sensibility is apparent just from the opening credits, which are superimposed on the image of a door-to-door saleslady getting various adverse reactions that are reflected in the way the names appear: when someone slams the door on her heel, knocking it off, the next credit is wavy and unbalanced; when someone else pulls the “Welcome” mat out from under her and she pratfalls, the next credit is shaky; when a kid dumps a pail of water on her, the next credit wipes in as if it’s being swept in with the tide.
Tashlin’s fingerprints are all over this film — the director is hacky Lloyd Bacon again, so this is really a Schreiber movie — notably in a great gag sequence in which Lucy and the bad guys are having a fight scene on a rooftop of an apartment building. The gag is that the rooftop is filled with TV aerials, and as the fight participants bang into them the TV images get mashed up and programs cut from one channel to another — a model whose looks are being described by the announcer in glowing turns suddenly metamorphoses into a gorilla from a nature documentary, and just when the announcer is talking about what great legs she has the picture splits, so she’s a human female above the waist but the legs are those of the gorilla. The Fuller Brush Girl has a plot, of sorts: Lucy plays Sally Elliot, who works as a receptionist for the Maritime Steamship Company (as opposed to all those land-based steamships we’ve been seeing lately; one wonders if Tashlin intended the redundancy of the firm’s name as another deliberate gag). Her fiancé Humphrey Briggs (Eddie Albert) works there too, as a file clerk, and they have $500 saved up for the down payment on the last available home in a new suburban development but in this pre-securitization, pre-“liar’s loans” age they’re sincerely worried about whether they can cover the monthly payments.
Sally tells Humphrey to walk into the office of the company’s owner, Harvey Simpson (Jerome Cowan), and demand that he be hired to replace the head of shipping whom Harvey has just fired. Humphrey is scared shitless about asking for the job, but it turns out Simpson gives it to him anyway — it seems Simpson has an illegal shipment of something-or-other coming in the next night and he wants a shipping chief who’s too dumb to suspect something is going wrong (a recycling of a plot device from Miss Grant Takes Richmond, in which Ball’s character got the job as Holden’s secretary because he was sure she’d be too dumb to realize his realty office was just a front for a bookie joint) — only Sally gets herself fired when she receives a visit from her friend Jane Bixby (Jeff Donnell — we’ve seen the Girl Named Jeff before in at least one other Columbia movie from the period), who’s working as a Fuller brush girl. It seems that the Fuller brush girls sell, not brushes, but cosmetics, and when Sally tries out some of them she gets powder all over herself — and all over Mr. Simpson as well — provoking an allergic reaction and also reducing the level of visibility in the office so much that she inadvertently plugs a lipstick container into the switchboard, setting it on fire (it creates some quite lovely fireworks as it consumes itself).
Simpson’s wife Claire (Lee Patrick — given the arm’s-length relationship of her and Jerome Cowan’s characters in The Maltese Falcon it’s odd indeed that they’re cast here as a married couple!) gets suspicious when she smells Sally’s powder on her husband’s coat and decides the reason he’s hustling her out of town on a vacation is so he can see another woman. She’s both right and wrong — he is involved with another woman, stripper Ruby Rawlings (Gale Robbins), who does a routine to the song “Put the Blame on Mame” from the Rita Hayworth vehicle Gilda (and actually uses the same pre-recording of the song by jazz singer Anita Ellis that Hayworth mimed to in Gilda), but the reason he wanted his wife out of town just then was so she wouldn’t get in the way when his illegal shipment came in. Sally and Humphrey get further involved in the skullduggery when she goes to the Simpsons’ home and finds Mrs. Simpson dead — she gets cold-cocked with a gun by Ruby, who’s passed herself off as Mrs. Simpson, which fools Our Heroine for a reel or so until Humphrey shows her a photo of the real Mrs. Simpson — and later Simpson himself is murdered in his office by the crooks who were supposed to get the illegal shipment, which turns out to be a bomb concealed in a wine barrel.
The film ends aboard ship, with Sally and Humphrey trying to hold the crooks at bay until the harbor police can come and arrest them — only in yet another cartoony gag Tashlin worked up for his finish, the bomb goes off, the ship explodes and the only part that’s left standing is a teeny piece of the deck that has transformed into a makeshift raft on which Sally and Humphrey are standing, locked in a romantic embrace and oblivious to the fact that the rest of the ship they were on has disintegrated. The Fuller Brush Girl has its flaws — Eddie Albert is personable and right for the milquetoast character he’s playing, and he and Lucy work together well enough but one misses the almost subliminal rapport Lucy had with Desi Arnaz and one can’t help but wish Desi could have starred in this film with her (the reason Lucy’s later TV shows weren’t as good as I Love Lucy is not only that they lacked Desi’s behind-the-scenes production skills but they lacked his on-screen talents as a straight man — like Laurel and Hardy, or that other real-life TV couple Burns and Allen, Lucy and Desi weren’t just comic and straight person but could play off each other and each get laughs) — but it’s still a screamingly funny movie and anyone who likes Lucy’s TV character will find it hilarious.
The film was The Fuller Brush Girl, a 1950 comic romp for Lucille Ball that Turner Classic Movies had shown earlier yesterday as part of a tribute to Ball on what would have been her 100th birthday. Though Lucille Ball had actually played a wide variety of roles in her film career — including out-and-out bitches in Dance, Girl, Dance and The Big Street and quite capable noir heroines in The Dark Corner, Lured and the 1949 Easy Living — and when she had done comedy it had generally been romantic comedy rather than slapstick, when she signed a three-film contract with Columbia in 1948 Harry Cohn had the idea that she could be a great physical comedienne. The result was two films, Miss Grant Takes Richmond and this one, that are almost beta versions of I Love Lucy — they cast Ball as a ditzy comedienne whose madcap schemes to get ahead get her and her loved one in plenty of trouble, and they’re light-hearted films that make you roar with laughter.
Miss Grant Takes Richmond seems stuck on the cusp between romantic comedy and slapstick — it’s a meeting-of-opposites plot between aspiring secretary Ball and bookie William Holden, and its resolution is that Ball not only lands Holden but persuades him he can make more money as a real-estate developer (the “cover” business for his bookie joint) than he can as a crook. (No comment on the thin, to say the least, distinction between real-estate developers and crooks.) The Fuller Brush Girl is considerably more relentless, and for that I think we have to thank screenwriter Frank Tashlin, who had a quite remarkable career trajectory. As a kid he’d watched the Laurel and Hardy movies almost religiously, and his first important job in movies came as a gag man for the Warner Bros. cartoon series — for which he raided his childhood memories of Laurel and Hardy and the other great live-action comedians he’d seen. When he started working on live-action films himself he brought along the sensibility he’d honed in cartoons and delighted in creating “cartoony” gags that were relatively easy to do with pen and paper but in live-action required some elaborate special-effects work.
He made his reputation on the Marx Brothers’ film A Night in Casablanca, for which he wrote the opening sequence that’s still the biggest thing anyone remembers about that movie: a cop spots Harpo Marx leaning against a building and asks him, voice dripping with sarcasm, “What are you doing — holding up the building?” The cop drags Harpo away from the building — and it falls; he really was holding it up! I suspect Tashlin was responsible for the more spectacular slapstick gags in Miss Grant Takes Richmond — particularly Ball’s great battle with a power shovel — and here, instead of sharing the writing credits with brothers Everett and Devery Freeman and Nat Perrin (also an ex-Marx Brothers writer), Tashlin got to do the screenplay all by himself. His sensibility is apparent just from the opening credits, which are superimposed on the image of a door-to-door saleslady getting various adverse reactions that are reflected in the way the names appear: when someone slams the door on her heel, knocking it off, the next credit is wavy and unbalanced; when someone else pulls the “Welcome” mat out from under her and she pratfalls, the next credit is shaky; when a kid dumps a pail of water on her, the next credit wipes in as if it’s being swept in with the tide.
Tashlin’s fingerprints are all over this film — the director is hacky Lloyd Bacon again, so this is really a Schreiber movie — notably in a great gag sequence in which Lucy and the bad guys are having a fight scene on a rooftop of an apartment building. The gag is that the rooftop is filled with TV aerials, and as the fight participants bang into them the TV images get mashed up and programs cut from one channel to another — a model whose looks are being described by the announcer in glowing turns suddenly metamorphoses into a gorilla from a nature documentary, and just when the announcer is talking about what great legs she has the picture splits, so she’s a human female above the waist but the legs are those of the gorilla. The Fuller Brush Girl has a plot, of sorts: Lucy plays Sally Elliot, who works as a receptionist for the Maritime Steamship Company (as opposed to all those land-based steamships we’ve been seeing lately; one wonders if Tashlin intended the redundancy of the firm’s name as another deliberate gag). Her fiancé Humphrey Briggs (Eddie Albert) works there too, as a file clerk, and they have $500 saved up for the down payment on the last available home in a new suburban development but in this pre-securitization, pre-“liar’s loans” age they’re sincerely worried about whether they can cover the monthly payments.
Sally tells Humphrey to walk into the office of the company’s owner, Harvey Simpson (Jerome Cowan), and demand that he be hired to replace the head of shipping whom Harvey has just fired. Humphrey is scared shitless about asking for the job, but it turns out Simpson gives it to him anyway — it seems Simpson has an illegal shipment of something-or-other coming in the next night and he wants a shipping chief who’s too dumb to suspect something is going wrong (a recycling of a plot device from Miss Grant Takes Richmond, in which Ball’s character got the job as Holden’s secretary because he was sure she’d be too dumb to realize his realty office was just a front for a bookie joint) — only Sally gets herself fired when she receives a visit from her friend Jane Bixby (Jeff Donnell — we’ve seen the Girl Named Jeff before in at least one other Columbia movie from the period), who’s working as a Fuller brush girl. It seems that the Fuller brush girls sell, not brushes, but cosmetics, and when Sally tries out some of them she gets powder all over herself — and all over Mr. Simpson as well — provoking an allergic reaction and also reducing the level of visibility in the office so much that she inadvertently plugs a lipstick container into the switchboard, setting it on fire (it creates some quite lovely fireworks as it consumes itself).
Simpson’s wife Claire (Lee Patrick — given the arm’s-length relationship of her and Jerome Cowan’s characters in The Maltese Falcon it’s odd indeed that they’re cast here as a married couple!) gets suspicious when she smells Sally’s powder on her husband’s coat and decides the reason he’s hustling her out of town on a vacation is so he can see another woman. She’s both right and wrong — he is involved with another woman, stripper Ruby Rawlings (Gale Robbins), who does a routine to the song “Put the Blame on Mame” from the Rita Hayworth vehicle Gilda (and actually uses the same pre-recording of the song by jazz singer Anita Ellis that Hayworth mimed to in Gilda), but the reason he wanted his wife out of town just then was so she wouldn’t get in the way when his illegal shipment came in. Sally and Humphrey get further involved in the skullduggery when she goes to the Simpsons’ home and finds Mrs. Simpson dead — she gets cold-cocked with a gun by Ruby, who’s passed herself off as Mrs. Simpson, which fools Our Heroine for a reel or so until Humphrey shows her a photo of the real Mrs. Simpson — and later Simpson himself is murdered in his office by the crooks who were supposed to get the illegal shipment, which turns out to be a bomb concealed in a wine barrel.
The film ends aboard ship, with Sally and Humphrey trying to hold the crooks at bay until the harbor police can come and arrest them — only in yet another cartoony gag Tashlin worked up for his finish, the bomb goes off, the ship explodes and the only part that’s left standing is a teeny piece of the deck that has transformed into a makeshift raft on which Sally and Humphrey are standing, locked in a romantic embrace and oblivious to the fact that the rest of the ship they were on has disintegrated. The Fuller Brush Girl has its flaws — Eddie Albert is personable and right for the milquetoast character he’s playing, and he and Lucy work together well enough but one misses the almost subliminal rapport Lucy had with Desi Arnaz and one can’t help but wish Desi could have starred in this film with her (the reason Lucy’s later TV shows weren’t as good as I Love Lucy is not only that they lacked Desi’s behind-the-scenes production skills but they lacked his on-screen talents as a straight man — like Laurel and Hardy, or that other real-life TV couple Burns and Allen, Lucy and Desi weren’t just comic and straight person but could play off each other and each get laughs) — but it’s still a screamingly funny movie and anyone who likes Lucy’s TV character will find it hilarious.
Friday, August 5, 2011
Lying Lips (Micheaux Pictures/Sack Amusement Enterprises, 1939)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was a recent archive.org download called Lying Lips, a 1939 “race movie” produced, directed and written by Oscar Micheaux towards the end of his career (he would make only two more films, The Notorious Elinor Lee from 1940 and The Betrayal from 1948, before his death in 1951). Micheaux was the pioneer of African-American cinema; starting with The Homesteader in 1919 he made 42 films as director, almost all of which he also produced and/or wrote (and in some cases they were based on stories he had previously published as novels), and in the silent era he was able to self-finance his films from his royalties as a novelist and shoot good-looking and thoroughly professional movies on low budgets.
Then he was hit by the double whammy of sound and the Depression; sound made production vastly more expensive — the days when you could take a silent camera and a bunch of diffusers to control the levels of light, shoot outdoors on real locations and come up with a movie visually equivalent to a major-studio production suddenly ended, and the opportunities for independent filmmakers to make movies of top quality, get them played in big theatres and win major-studio contracts (as Josef von Sternberg had in 1925 with The Salvation Hunters and Robert Florey had in 1928 with the short The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra) disappeared, not to return until the advent of video, and then digital video, democratized production again. What it meant for Micheaux was not only that he could no longer self-finance but he had to look for white backers.
Sound also affected Micheaux’ films in a bad way that was entirely his responsibility: the availability of dialogue encouraged his annoying tendency towards preachiness, towards having his characters spell out at great length in soporific dialogue Micheaux’ philosophy of racial advancement and the responsibility Negroes (the term he used at a time when the general non-pejorative reference to African-Americans was “colored people”) had to each other and their race as a whole. Like a lot of Black and racially sympathetic white filmmakers, Micheaux had been inspired by D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation — Micheaux’ second film, Within the Gates, was basically intended as a response movie — and, like Griffith himself, Micheaux fell from popularity when younger Black audiences grew impatient with the static quality of his films and the unsubtlety with which he hammered home his old-fashioned moral messages. Micheaux tried to keep himself in business by grafting bits of newer Black culture into his movies — in 1938 he made a movie called Swing! but it was essentially a Jazz Singer knock-off about a Black classical violinist who’s angry with his son for wanting to play swing (and it was pretty clear where Micheaux’ own sympathies lay!) — and Lying Lips emerges as a combination musical (at least in the first half), gangster movie and melodrama.
The star is Edna Mae Harris, a singer and dancer (her two songs are the best parts of the movie!) who plays the part of Elsie Bellwood, entertainer at the Poodle Dog nightclub (and as with a lot of cheap white movies the nightclub actually looks like a real nightclub, not like an airplane hangar done up in art deco), who both looks and sounds so much like the zaftig white singer Mildred Bailey that for a moment I was wondering if it was Mildred Bailey, “passing” in reverse and getting a job in a race movie after white producers turned her down because of her size. (Like most of the “good guys” of both genders in Micheaux’ movies, Harris is light-skinned — a “high yellow” in the Black slang of the day — and his films often show the odd internal racism within the Black community of his time that the lighter you were, the more highly regarded you were. Indeed, so many of Micheaux’ films feature a light-skinned leading lady who’s thought to be white and only revealed at the end to be Black, and therefore a suitable match for the Black leading man, I wondered if Micheaux, with his French name, was mixed-race himself and whether his anxieties about it found their way into his scripts.)
The plot turns around Elsie’s refusal to entertain the nightclub’s customers (particularly its rich gangster customers) at “private parties,” a veiled metaphor for prostitution and probably a much more frank sexual reference than a white filmmaker could have got away with at the time. (Later we see Elsie undressing to take a bath — and we see quite a lot more of her than we’d have of a white actress in a similar situation in a mainstream Hollywood movie. I guess the Black theatres at which these films were shown weren’t signatories to the Production Code.) Elsie lives with her aunt and is dating the Poodle Dog’s manager, Benny Hadnot (Carman Newsome), who’s supporting her in her refusal to yield to the entreaties of Farina (Don De Leo), the Poodle Dog’s owner, and his white backer Garotti (Charles La Torre), to go to those fate-worse-than-death “parties.” [Both the American Film Institute Catalog and imdb.com list De Leo as a white actor, but his hair is so heavily plastered on his face with chemicals I thought he was a light-skinned Black man wearing a “process.”] Hadnot announces he’s going to quit his job and Elsie offers to quit too, but he convinces her to stay on because she’s popular but insist that all she’s going to do for her pay is sing and dance. Hadnot can afford to lose his job because he’s in line for a better one as an investigator with district attorney Eckert (Robert Paquin).
Then the plot turns as Elsie’s aunt Josephine (Gladys Williams) is found dead in their apartment — Elsie comes home from her job at 3 a.m., thinks the old woman is merely sleeping, takes a bath, is pulled out of the bathtub by a phone call from someone who asks to speak to Josephine, and it’s only when Elsie tries to wake her up to take the call that she realizes her aunt is dead. She’s arrested and convicted of the murder, thanks to a frame-up instituted by Farina and Elsie’s cousins John (Cherokee Thornton) and Clyde (“Slim” Thompson), but Benny is convinced she’s innocent and teams up with a Black police officer, Detective Wanzer (Robert Earl Jones, father of modern-day Black actor James Earl Jones) — whereupon they end up tracing the murder back to an elaborate scheme involving the characters before they left the South and came to the large (and unnamed) Northern city where the first half of the film took place. Ned Green (Henry “Gang” Gines) was in love with Josephine, but another woman, Elizabeth (Frances Williams) — yet another cousin of Elsie (she seems to have as many cousins as Siegfried had aunts!) — told Ned that he had got her pregnant and tricked him into marrying her.
The marriage was performed by Rev. Bryson (Juano Hernandez, whose first name is misspelled “Jauno” on the credits and who later got to act in some respectable mainstream movies, including Clarence Brown’s anti-lynching drama Intruder in the Dust and John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge), who when it turned out that Elizabeth wasn’t pregnant after all advised Ned to stick it out with the marriage anyway. Ned tried to leave Elizabeth but John and Clyde traced him when he moved up north. Benny and Wanzer learn this story from Rev. Bryson and trace John, kidnap him and threaten to take him to a “haunted” house and lock him in, and out of sheer fear John admits that he killed Josephine and framed Elsie so he, brother Clyde and sister Elizabeth would collect Josephine’s $15,000 inheritance. Ben and Elsie get together, and when Ben gives Elsie the money that’s rightfully hers, she tells him to keep it, and finally (doing the pillar-of-responsibility number of a true Micheaux hero) he says he’s going to use it to start a trust fund for their children.
Lying Lips is at its best when the characters are singing and dancing — Edna Mae Harris wasn’t going to keep Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald lying awake nights worried about the competition, but she’s charming, personable and has a strong voice that does justice to her two songs, “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” by Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer (which also includes a quite beautiful acoustic guitar solo; the guitarist remains unseen but it sounds like he was finger-picking) and “I’ve Got a Heart Full of Rhythm” by Louis Armstrong and Horace Gerlach. (I’d heard the latter song from Armstrong’s 1937 recording but hadn’t realized he actually wrote it.) There’s also an unidentified dancer who auditions for a job at the Poodle Dog by singing and dancing to Shelton Brooks’ “Some of These Days” (Brooks, who also wrote “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” was also Black, but he wrote “Some of These Days” for the white singer Sophie Tucker, whose trademark it became, though the version heard here owes a lot more to Bing Crosby’s marvelous 1933 recording of it with Frank Trumbauer’s band — the Black singer here copies a lot of Bing’s inflections, vocal moods and scat interjections — so much for the common assumption that the influence between Black and white performers ran only one way!) and later does a non-singing dance to a medley of Vincent Youmans’ “Tea for Two” and Jean Schwartz’s “Chinatown, My Chinatown.”
Alas, after Elsie gets popped for the murder (Benny and Wanzer are shown visiting her in prison, in a quite effective stylized set that for once makes a virtue out of this film’s poverty-stricken budget) the music stops — literally — and the plot drags. Lying Lips is better produced than your average race movie, and the acting is also at least marginally better (the line delivery is relatively naturalistic most of the time, and when it isn’t the fault seems to lie more with Micheaux’ stilted dialogue than with the performers attempting to make it sound like real conversation) — one doesn’t sit through this one, as one does with a lot of other race movies from the period, and wonder, “Where were all the Black people who could act?” — and as tiresome as Micheaux’ preaching gets sometimes, it’s clear that he was someone who believed in what he was doing and wasn’t just throwing a quickly written script and a bunch of low-budget performers in front of a camera and calling it a movie.
The film was a recent archive.org download called Lying Lips, a 1939 “race movie” produced, directed and written by Oscar Micheaux towards the end of his career (he would make only two more films, The Notorious Elinor Lee from 1940 and The Betrayal from 1948, before his death in 1951). Micheaux was the pioneer of African-American cinema; starting with The Homesteader in 1919 he made 42 films as director, almost all of which he also produced and/or wrote (and in some cases they were based on stories he had previously published as novels), and in the silent era he was able to self-finance his films from his royalties as a novelist and shoot good-looking and thoroughly professional movies on low budgets.
Then he was hit by the double whammy of sound and the Depression; sound made production vastly more expensive — the days when you could take a silent camera and a bunch of diffusers to control the levels of light, shoot outdoors on real locations and come up with a movie visually equivalent to a major-studio production suddenly ended, and the opportunities for independent filmmakers to make movies of top quality, get them played in big theatres and win major-studio contracts (as Josef von Sternberg had in 1925 with The Salvation Hunters and Robert Florey had in 1928 with the short The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra) disappeared, not to return until the advent of video, and then digital video, democratized production again. What it meant for Micheaux was not only that he could no longer self-finance but he had to look for white backers.
Sound also affected Micheaux’ films in a bad way that was entirely his responsibility: the availability of dialogue encouraged his annoying tendency towards preachiness, towards having his characters spell out at great length in soporific dialogue Micheaux’ philosophy of racial advancement and the responsibility Negroes (the term he used at a time when the general non-pejorative reference to African-Americans was “colored people”) had to each other and their race as a whole. Like a lot of Black and racially sympathetic white filmmakers, Micheaux had been inspired by D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation — Micheaux’ second film, Within the Gates, was basically intended as a response movie — and, like Griffith himself, Micheaux fell from popularity when younger Black audiences grew impatient with the static quality of his films and the unsubtlety with which he hammered home his old-fashioned moral messages. Micheaux tried to keep himself in business by grafting bits of newer Black culture into his movies — in 1938 he made a movie called Swing! but it was essentially a Jazz Singer knock-off about a Black classical violinist who’s angry with his son for wanting to play swing (and it was pretty clear where Micheaux’ own sympathies lay!) — and Lying Lips emerges as a combination musical (at least in the first half), gangster movie and melodrama.
The star is Edna Mae Harris, a singer and dancer (her two songs are the best parts of the movie!) who plays the part of Elsie Bellwood, entertainer at the Poodle Dog nightclub (and as with a lot of cheap white movies the nightclub actually looks like a real nightclub, not like an airplane hangar done up in art deco), who both looks and sounds so much like the zaftig white singer Mildred Bailey that for a moment I was wondering if it was Mildred Bailey, “passing” in reverse and getting a job in a race movie after white producers turned her down because of her size. (Like most of the “good guys” of both genders in Micheaux’ movies, Harris is light-skinned — a “high yellow” in the Black slang of the day — and his films often show the odd internal racism within the Black community of his time that the lighter you were, the more highly regarded you were. Indeed, so many of Micheaux’ films feature a light-skinned leading lady who’s thought to be white and only revealed at the end to be Black, and therefore a suitable match for the Black leading man, I wondered if Micheaux, with his French name, was mixed-race himself and whether his anxieties about it found their way into his scripts.)
The plot turns around Elsie’s refusal to entertain the nightclub’s customers (particularly its rich gangster customers) at “private parties,” a veiled metaphor for prostitution and probably a much more frank sexual reference than a white filmmaker could have got away with at the time. (Later we see Elsie undressing to take a bath — and we see quite a lot more of her than we’d have of a white actress in a similar situation in a mainstream Hollywood movie. I guess the Black theatres at which these films were shown weren’t signatories to the Production Code.) Elsie lives with her aunt and is dating the Poodle Dog’s manager, Benny Hadnot (Carman Newsome), who’s supporting her in her refusal to yield to the entreaties of Farina (Don De Leo), the Poodle Dog’s owner, and his white backer Garotti (Charles La Torre), to go to those fate-worse-than-death “parties.” [Both the American Film Institute Catalog and imdb.com list De Leo as a white actor, but his hair is so heavily plastered on his face with chemicals I thought he was a light-skinned Black man wearing a “process.”] Hadnot announces he’s going to quit his job and Elsie offers to quit too, but he convinces her to stay on because she’s popular but insist that all she’s going to do for her pay is sing and dance. Hadnot can afford to lose his job because he’s in line for a better one as an investigator with district attorney Eckert (Robert Paquin).
Then the plot turns as Elsie’s aunt Josephine (Gladys Williams) is found dead in their apartment — Elsie comes home from her job at 3 a.m., thinks the old woman is merely sleeping, takes a bath, is pulled out of the bathtub by a phone call from someone who asks to speak to Josephine, and it’s only when Elsie tries to wake her up to take the call that she realizes her aunt is dead. She’s arrested and convicted of the murder, thanks to a frame-up instituted by Farina and Elsie’s cousins John (Cherokee Thornton) and Clyde (“Slim” Thompson), but Benny is convinced she’s innocent and teams up with a Black police officer, Detective Wanzer (Robert Earl Jones, father of modern-day Black actor James Earl Jones) — whereupon they end up tracing the murder back to an elaborate scheme involving the characters before they left the South and came to the large (and unnamed) Northern city where the first half of the film took place. Ned Green (Henry “Gang” Gines) was in love with Josephine, but another woman, Elizabeth (Frances Williams) — yet another cousin of Elsie (she seems to have as many cousins as Siegfried had aunts!) — told Ned that he had got her pregnant and tricked him into marrying her.
The marriage was performed by Rev. Bryson (Juano Hernandez, whose first name is misspelled “Jauno” on the credits and who later got to act in some respectable mainstream movies, including Clarence Brown’s anti-lynching drama Intruder in the Dust and John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge), who when it turned out that Elizabeth wasn’t pregnant after all advised Ned to stick it out with the marriage anyway. Ned tried to leave Elizabeth but John and Clyde traced him when he moved up north. Benny and Wanzer learn this story from Rev. Bryson and trace John, kidnap him and threaten to take him to a “haunted” house and lock him in, and out of sheer fear John admits that he killed Josephine and framed Elsie so he, brother Clyde and sister Elizabeth would collect Josephine’s $15,000 inheritance. Ben and Elsie get together, and when Ben gives Elsie the money that’s rightfully hers, she tells him to keep it, and finally (doing the pillar-of-responsibility number of a true Micheaux hero) he says he’s going to use it to start a trust fund for their children.
Lying Lips is at its best when the characters are singing and dancing — Edna Mae Harris wasn’t going to keep Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald lying awake nights worried about the competition, but she’s charming, personable and has a strong voice that does justice to her two songs, “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” by Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer (which also includes a quite beautiful acoustic guitar solo; the guitarist remains unseen but it sounds like he was finger-picking) and “I’ve Got a Heart Full of Rhythm” by Louis Armstrong and Horace Gerlach. (I’d heard the latter song from Armstrong’s 1937 recording but hadn’t realized he actually wrote it.) There’s also an unidentified dancer who auditions for a job at the Poodle Dog by singing and dancing to Shelton Brooks’ “Some of These Days” (Brooks, who also wrote “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” was also Black, but he wrote “Some of These Days” for the white singer Sophie Tucker, whose trademark it became, though the version heard here owes a lot more to Bing Crosby’s marvelous 1933 recording of it with Frank Trumbauer’s band — the Black singer here copies a lot of Bing’s inflections, vocal moods and scat interjections — so much for the common assumption that the influence between Black and white performers ran only one way!) and later does a non-singing dance to a medley of Vincent Youmans’ “Tea for Two” and Jean Schwartz’s “Chinatown, My Chinatown.”
Alas, after Elsie gets popped for the murder (Benny and Wanzer are shown visiting her in prison, in a quite effective stylized set that for once makes a virtue out of this film’s poverty-stricken budget) the music stops — literally — and the plot drags. Lying Lips is better produced than your average race movie, and the acting is also at least marginally better (the line delivery is relatively naturalistic most of the time, and when it isn’t the fault seems to lie more with Micheaux’ stilted dialogue than with the performers attempting to make it sound like real conversation) — one doesn’t sit through this one, as one does with a lot of other race movies from the period, and wonder, “Where were all the Black people who could act?” — and as tiresome as Micheaux’ preaching gets sometimes, it’s clear that he was someone who believed in what he was doing and wasn’t just throwing a quickly written script and a bunch of low-budget performers in front of a camera and calling it a movie.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Captain America: The First Avenger (Paramount/Marvel, 2011)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I went to see the film Captain America: The First Avenger at the Regal theatres in Horton Plaza, an item that had been on our to-do list since the movie came out while we were slogging our way through the 1944 Republic serial featuring (sort of) the same character — though the new film sticks far more closely to the origin story of Captain America from the 1941 comic by Timely (later Marvel). The film opens in modern-day Norway, in a sequence showing the discovery of a wrecked airplane in the snow and a person inside it whose body had been kept in suspended animation by the cold (and the notoriously active air conditioning in the theatres at Horton Plaza added to the believability of this scene!). Then it flashes back to New York City in 1941, and introduces orphan boy Steve Rogers (Chris Evans, a normally robust and buff actor digitally “shrunk” to the scrawny dimensions of the 90-pound weakling he’s playing), who’s desperately trying to enlist in the U.S. Army and keeps getting turned down because of his overall puniness and history of asthma and other chronic diseases. (He’s an orphan because his father was killed in World War I and his mother died of tuberculosis.) His friend James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes (Sebastian Stan) has no trouble getting in, but Rogers not only gets rejected by the military but regularly gets beaten up by just about every bigger, stronger man he encounters — including a guy he chews out in a movie theatre for demanding that the management stop the newsreel about the war and show the rest of the program already.
All that changes, of course, when he finally gets into the military and, like William Tracy in that interesting series of service comedies the Hal Roach Studios made during the actual war casting him as a scrawny recruit who uses his brains and rises through the ranks, he figures out how to bring down a flag no one else has been able to get because they haven’t been able to climb up the flagpole. Instead of climbing, Our Soon-to-Be Hero simply removes the bolts holding the flagpole in place, lets it fall and picks up the flag from the flagpole. Both this sort of resourcefulness and Rogers’ almost masochistic willingness to take punishment and abuse convinces Nazi refugee scientist Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) that Rogers is the perfect subject for an experiment he wants to perform in which both his physical strength and his perceptions will be artificially heightened by a combination of injections of a blue serum and an electrical treatment which requires Steve to be locked in a high-tech sarcophagus and go through some of the same tortures-of-the-damned routines we’re used to seeing in movies about heroin withdrawal.
These sequences are intercut, sometimes confusingly, with scenes taking place in occupied Norway involving a secret Nazi research team called HYDRA — with a logo of the mythical multi-headed hydra taking the place of the swastika on their uniforms and of the Mercedes star symbol on their cars — headed by Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving), who hired Dr. Erskine to develop the super-strength treatment in the first place and who also discovered a glowing white cube that he claims was formerly the property of the god Odin (Wotan to you Wagnerites out there) and which supplies a limitless source of energy to power all the high-tech weaponry his research team, headed by the oddly nerdy Dr. Arnim Zola (Toby Jones), has devised, including light-powered ray guns and a flying-wing airplane called the Valkyrie which according to an imdb.com poster was actually derived from genuine designs the Germans experimented with (Horten X.XVIII and Triebflügeljäger), though frankly it looked to me like they got the “look” of the thing from the Flying Wing seen in the Republic serials Dick Tracy (1937) and The Fighting Devil Dogs (1938).
Unfortunately for our side, a Nazi assassin manages to crash the secret lab in which Dr. Erskine works the transformation — which Our Hero was brought to by a British liaison, Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), with whom he naturally falls in love — and kills Erskine. He tries to steal one ampule of the super-serum, but Steve Rogers gives chase (this is one superhero movie in which the hero doesn’t get a chance to try out his new-found powers; he has to press them into service in an actual emergency right away!) and manages to keep the bad guys from getting it, only the ampule breaks so the good guys don’t have it either, nor do they have a sample from which it could be reconstructed. Not knowing what to do with their lab-created superman, the Army first tries to send him to Alamogordo for tests and then, when Rogers refuses, they dress him up in costume as “Captain America” and have him do vaudeville shows and other live appearances to encourage people to buy war bonds. (They also give him, his chorus line of 12 “America-ettes” and the guy in his act [James Payton] who plays “Adolph [sic] Hitler” a suitably insipid song to perform; frequent Disney composer Alan Menken must have had fun writing something this deliberately bad.)
Eventually we learn that Schmidt also went through Dr. Erskine’s process, though he experienced an earlier version of it with the side effect that his face turned beet-red and acquired the finely chiseled characteristics of Max Schreck’s Nosferatu makeup (and I suspect that was actually the inspiration of the people who created the design of his face). He also sailed into a heavy-duty megalomania that made Hitler look like Mother Teresa by comparison, and he worked out a plot to conquer the entire world with his high-tech weapons and install himself, not his nominal boss, as the world’s Führer. Captain America assembles a commando squad with himself as its commander and his friend Bucky Barnes (who was actually prepubescent in the original comics, one of those Boy Companions, like Batman’s Robin, whom the comics writers of the early 1940’s thought would humanize the books and give them more resonance to their mostly prepubescent and barely pubescent male readership — though in Jules Feiffer’s famous essay on the history of comics, replete with illustrations from the Golden Age, he was witheringly scornful of Boy Companions and said he’d never liked them) as his assistant, and together they stage a series of raids that take down HYDRA’s centers of operation, one by one — until they get to the last one in Norway.
Captain America loses Bucky, who falls from a moving train both he and the Captain are trying to board into a crevasse, and ultimately he discovers that Valkyrie is a huge bomber loaded with one missile each that is labeled “New York,” “Chicago,” etc. Cap realizes that his only chance to save America’s largest cities is to board Valkyrie, take over her controls and ditch the ship somewhere at sea — and eventually good triumphs over evil but good also finds himself encased in a block of ice for 70 years, from which he’s awakened in a hospital room where, in an attempt to ease his transition, they’re playing a recorded broadcast of a Brooklyn Dodgers (you remember) baseball game from 1941 — only Cap recognizes the game because he actually attended it, and he escapes from the hospital and finds himself face to face with the future-shocking reality of New York c. 2011. There’s a tag scene in the credits where he’s punching a heavy bag, and Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury (a character who was white in the comics, by the way) makes two cameo appearances setting up a sequel in which Cap will appear with Thor and quite a few other members of the Marvel Universe in the 2012 film The Avengers.
Captain America was directed by Joe Johnston, a problematical filmmaker who’s like the little girl with the curl: when he is good (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Rocketeer, October Sky) he is very, very good, and when he is bad (the franchise-killer Jurassic Park III and — by reputation, since I haven’t actually seen these — Jumanji and the 2010 Wolfman) he is horrid. This time around he’s very, very good, perhaps inspired by the similarities between this story and The Rocketeer (also a tale of an accidental superhero set during World War II with the Nazis as villains, and with a mysterious rich man in the background helping Our Hero — Howard Hughes in The Rocketeer and here the Hughes-like Howard Stark, who’s supposed to be either the father or grandfather of Iron Man and is actually played by someone, Dominic Cooper, I could readily imagine siring Robert Downey, Jr.). Johnston moves the film at a surprisingly stately pace, even during the action scenes, evoking the style of the actual movies of the 1940’s instead of turning it into a big-bang-a-minute thriller.
The film’s visual design is quite appealing, especially in its evocation of what people in 1942 thought the world’s high-tech future would look like. The script is by just two people, working as a team — Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely — which probably has a lot to do with why this is a better constructed movie than most of the superhero films out there — and it’s well acted, even though I found Chris Evans more believable as his other Marvel hero, the rambunctious Human Torch in the two Fantastic Four movies from 20th Century-Fox, than I did here. Still, he’s personable and hot, right for the role both physically and as a “type.” After Hugo Weaving’s marvelous performance as the hero of “V” for Vendetta it’s disappointing, to say the least, to see him as a villain again — and frankly I think it would have been better if Christoph Waltz had got the part — but as the heroine Hayley Atwell has the appealing spunkiness of her role models in Republic serials. Though I didn’t enjoy it anywhere near as much as Thor, Captain America is still an excellent movie in the superhero genre c. 2011.
Charles and I went to see the film Captain America: The First Avenger at the Regal theatres in Horton Plaza, an item that had been on our to-do list since the movie came out while we were slogging our way through the 1944 Republic serial featuring (sort of) the same character — though the new film sticks far more closely to the origin story of Captain America from the 1941 comic by Timely (later Marvel). The film opens in modern-day Norway, in a sequence showing the discovery of a wrecked airplane in the snow and a person inside it whose body had been kept in suspended animation by the cold (and the notoriously active air conditioning in the theatres at Horton Plaza added to the believability of this scene!). Then it flashes back to New York City in 1941, and introduces orphan boy Steve Rogers (Chris Evans, a normally robust and buff actor digitally “shrunk” to the scrawny dimensions of the 90-pound weakling he’s playing), who’s desperately trying to enlist in the U.S. Army and keeps getting turned down because of his overall puniness and history of asthma and other chronic diseases. (He’s an orphan because his father was killed in World War I and his mother died of tuberculosis.) His friend James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes (Sebastian Stan) has no trouble getting in, but Rogers not only gets rejected by the military but regularly gets beaten up by just about every bigger, stronger man he encounters — including a guy he chews out in a movie theatre for demanding that the management stop the newsreel about the war and show the rest of the program already.
All that changes, of course, when he finally gets into the military and, like William Tracy in that interesting series of service comedies the Hal Roach Studios made during the actual war casting him as a scrawny recruit who uses his brains and rises through the ranks, he figures out how to bring down a flag no one else has been able to get because they haven’t been able to climb up the flagpole. Instead of climbing, Our Soon-to-Be Hero simply removes the bolts holding the flagpole in place, lets it fall and picks up the flag from the flagpole. Both this sort of resourcefulness and Rogers’ almost masochistic willingness to take punishment and abuse convinces Nazi refugee scientist Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) that Rogers is the perfect subject for an experiment he wants to perform in which both his physical strength and his perceptions will be artificially heightened by a combination of injections of a blue serum and an electrical treatment which requires Steve to be locked in a high-tech sarcophagus and go through some of the same tortures-of-the-damned routines we’re used to seeing in movies about heroin withdrawal.
These sequences are intercut, sometimes confusingly, with scenes taking place in occupied Norway involving a secret Nazi research team called HYDRA — with a logo of the mythical multi-headed hydra taking the place of the swastika on their uniforms and of the Mercedes star symbol on their cars — headed by Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving), who hired Dr. Erskine to develop the super-strength treatment in the first place and who also discovered a glowing white cube that he claims was formerly the property of the god Odin (Wotan to you Wagnerites out there) and which supplies a limitless source of energy to power all the high-tech weaponry his research team, headed by the oddly nerdy Dr. Arnim Zola (Toby Jones), has devised, including light-powered ray guns and a flying-wing airplane called the Valkyrie which according to an imdb.com poster was actually derived from genuine designs the Germans experimented with (Horten X.XVIII and Triebflügeljäger), though frankly it looked to me like they got the “look” of the thing from the Flying Wing seen in the Republic serials Dick Tracy (1937) and The Fighting Devil Dogs (1938).
Unfortunately for our side, a Nazi assassin manages to crash the secret lab in which Dr. Erskine works the transformation — which Our Hero was brought to by a British liaison, Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), with whom he naturally falls in love — and kills Erskine. He tries to steal one ampule of the super-serum, but Steve Rogers gives chase (this is one superhero movie in which the hero doesn’t get a chance to try out his new-found powers; he has to press them into service in an actual emergency right away!) and manages to keep the bad guys from getting it, only the ampule breaks so the good guys don’t have it either, nor do they have a sample from which it could be reconstructed. Not knowing what to do with their lab-created superman, the Army first tries to send him to Alamogordo for tests and then, when Rogers refuses, they dress him up in costume as “Captain America” and have him do vaudeville shows and other live appearances to encourage people to buy war bonds. (They also give him, his chorus line of 12 “America-ettes” and the guy in his act [James Payton] who plays “Adolph [sic] Hitler” a suitably insipid song to perform; frequent Disney composer Alan Menken must have had fun writing something this deliberately bad.)
Eventually we learn that Schmidt also went through Dr. Erskine’s process, though he experienced an earlier version of it with the side effect that his face turned beet-red and acquired the finely chiseled characteristics of Max Schreck’s Nosferatu makeup (and I suspect that was actually the inspiration of the people who created the design of his face). He also sailed into a heavy-duty megalomania that made Hitler look like Mother Teresa by comparison, and he worked out a plot to conquer the entire world with his high-tech weapons and install himself, not his nominal boss, as the world’s Führer. Captain America assembles a commando squad with himself as its commander and his friend Bucky Barnes (who was actually prepubescent in the original comics, one of those Boy Companions, like Batman’s Robin, whom the comics writers of the early 1940’s thought would humanize the books and give them more resonance to their mostly prepubescent and barely pubescent male readership — though in Jules Feiffer’s famous essay on the history of comics, replete with illustrations from the Golden Age, he was witheringly scornful of Boy Companions and said he’d never liked them) as his assistant, and together they stage a series of raids that take down HYDRA’s centers of operation, one by one — until they get to the last one in Norway.
Captain America loses Bucky, who falls from a moving train both he and the Captain are trying to board into a crevasse, and ultimately he discovers that Valkyrie is a huge bomber loaded with one missile each that is labeled “New York,” “Chicago,” etc. Cap realizes that his only chance to save America’s largest cities is to board Valkyrie, take over her controls and ditch the ship somewhere at sea — and eventually good triumphs over evil but good also finds himself encased in a block of ice for 70 years, from which he’s awakened in a hospital room where, in an attempt to ease his transition, they’re playing a recorded broadcast of a Brooklyn Dodgers (you remember) baseball game from 1941 — only Cap recognizes the game because he actually attended it, and he escapes from the hospital and finds himself face to face with the future-shocking reality of New York c. 2011. There’s a tag scene in the credits where he’s punching a heavy bag, and Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury (a character who was white in the comics, by the way) makes two cameo appearances setting up a sequel in which Cap will appear with Thor and quite a few other members of the Marvel Universe in the 2012 film The Avengers.
Captain America was directed by Joe Johnston, a problematical filmmaker who’s like the little girl with the curl: when he is good (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Rocketeer, October Sky) he is very, very good, and when he is bad (the franchise-killer Jurassic Park III and — by reputation, since I haven’t actually seen these — Jumanji and the 2010 Wolfman) he is horrid. This time around he’s very, very good, perhaps inspired by the similarities between this story and The Rocketeer (also a tale of an accidental superhero set during World War II with the Nazis as villains, and with a mysterious rich man in the background helping Our Hero — Howard Hughes in The Rocketeer and here the Hughes-like Howard Stark, who’s supposed to be either the father or grandfather of Iron Man and is actually played by someone, Dominic Cooper, I could readily imagine siring Robert Downey, Jr.). Johnston moves the film at a surprisingly stately pace, even during the action scenes, evoking the style of the actual movies of the 1940’s instead of turning it into a big-bang-a-minute thriller.
The film’s visual design is quite appealing, especially in its evocation of what people in 1942 thought the world’s high-tech future would look like. The script is by just two people, working as a team — Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely — which probably has a lot to do with why this is a better constructed movie than most of the superhero films out there — and it’s well acted, even though I found Chris Evans more believable as his other Marvel hero, the rambunctious Human Torch in the two Fantastic Four movies from 20th Century-Fox, than I did here. Still, he’s personable and hot, right for the role both physically and as a “type.” After Hugo Weaving’s marvelous performance as the hero of “V” for Vendetta it’s disappointing, to say the least, to see him as a villain again — and frankly I think it would have been better if Christoph Waltz had got the part — but as the heroine Hayley Atwell has the appealing spunkiness of her role models in Republic serials. Though I didn’t enjoy it anywhere near as much as Thor, Captain America is still an excellent movie in the superhero genre c. 2011.
Assassin of Youth (BCM Productions, 1937)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Assassin of Youth, third and probably least well-known of the bizarre trio of anti-marijuana movies that emerged in the mid-1930’s as part of the campaign of Harry J. Anslinger, basically America’s first “drug czar,” to make the Killer Weed illegal (and thereby preserve the jobs of all the Prohibition enforcement agents after the whole madness of trying to make alcohol illegal finally ended). The most famous of the trio is, of course, Reefer Madness (though that was a 1940’s reissue title and it was originally released as Tell Your Children and The Burning Question), though perhaps the weirdest of the bunch is Dwain Esper’s Marihuana: Weed with Roots in Hell, with its topless women (obviously these things weren’t shown in conventional theatres that had to adhere to the Production Code — usually entrepreneurs would travel with a projector and a print and set up in any venue that would have them) and weird death scene for the heroine, who literally sheds marijuana cigarettes as she’s expiring.
Assassin of Youth was produced by Leo J. McCarthy, directed by former D. W. Griffith actor Elmer Clifton and co-written by both of them, and it’s a bit more coherent plot-wise than the other two — perhaps merely because it dredges deeper into the bank of movie clichés, this time featuring a cub reporter, Art Brighton (Arthur Gardner), who’s assigned by his irascible editor (if there’s a 1930’s movie that features a newspaper editor who isn’t irascible, I’d like to know what it is) to investigate the case of Elizabeth Barry, small-town grandmother who was killed when she was run over by a car driven by marijuana-crazed youth. It turns out Elizabeth left a will leaving her entire fortune to her granddaughter Joan (Luana Walters, top-billed) but only if Joan remains a woman of good moral character. The next in line for the inheritance is Joan’s cousin Linda Clayton (Fay McKenzie), who’s already fallen far off the straight and narrow: she’s secretly married to Jack Howard (Michael Owen) — the reason for the secrecy is so Jack can set out to seduce any young woman whose ruination they decide would be profitable for Linda’s drug-dealing business.
Accordingly they set out to ruin Joan — if they can’t get her to sin for real, they figure they can at least give her a bad reputation that will ruin her in the eyes of Judge George Herbert (Henry Roquemore), who has jurisdiction over Elizabeth’s will — and the campaign starts when they get Joan to go with them and their friends to a “weenie-roast” by the town lake. Joan slips and falls into the lake (we don’t actually see this happen so we’re uncertain whether she just fell or Jack pushed her), gets her clothes wet, and Linda hangs them to dry so close to the fire they burn up (once again, we don’t see this so we can’t be sure whether this was accidental or intentional) and Joan has to go home in a coat borrowed from one of the men at the party and nothing under it. This catches the attention of town gossip Henrietta Frisbie (Fern Emmett), who drives a motor scooter (I didn’t know they had motor scooters in 1937!) instead of a bicycle but otherwise looks so much like Margaret Hamilton in the Kansas scenes of The Wizard of Oz it’s hard to believe that Wizard was actually made two years later.
Meanwhile, Art has bluffed his way into a job as a soda jerk at the drugstore owned by Henry “Pop” Brady (Earl Dwire) — Judge Herbert hangs out there and the two old men have been playing checkers, and cheating, for decades — where all the drug-crazed youth of the town also come for more salubrious refreshments. Art’s editor shows him a film-within-a-film of a lecturer talking about the evils of marijuana (this essentially serves the same function as the framing lecturer in Reefer Madness, cloaking all this decadence under the guise of “education”), and Art returns to the small town determined to uncover the suppliers who are giving Linda her merchandise. Then we learn that Joan has a sister, Marjorie (Dorothy Short, who was in Reefer Madness as well — poor girl), who’s already done so much pot she’s on the thin edge of insanity, which she proves by nearly knifing a supposed rival for her boyfriend’s affections at yet another one of the surprisingly boring “wild” parties at which most of the film takes place. Then again, maybe it’s not that surprising at all: part of the strategy behind these movies seems to have been to discourage people from slipping into the demi-monde by making the demi-monde seem hopelessly dull and simply not worth bothering with.
Jack and Linda continue their campaign to ruin Joan by feeding her drugged food and drink (there are at least two references in the dialogue to “something stronger” than marijuana, but there’s no mention of what the “something stronger” is and it’s impossible to tally the effects of whatever it is as depicted with those of any known non-fictional drug), and Art’s attempt to use Joan to entrap Linda and her suppliers goes haywire big time when Jack and Linda feed her a drugged snack, she passes out in Jack’s bed and she’s told the next day that they had sex. By sheer mischance (or authorial fiat), all this happens on the eve of the hearing over Elizabeth Barry’s will, and Joan refuses to testify; Judge Herbert is about to rule that she doesn’t get the money when Art arrives in the nick of time with the evidence against Linda and exonerates Joan, whom he plans to marry — though there’s an interesting ambiguity whether they’re going to move to the big city while Art continues his newspaper career or settle for life in the quieter small-town environment Joan has always known.
Assassin of Youth is probably the best-made of the trio — it was shot at Grand National Studios (as I suspect Reefer Madness was as well) and has a perfectly acceptable production “finish,” but virtually no one in it can actually act; Luana Walters ended up in some of the Bela Lugosi Monograms but no one else seemed to have much of a subsequent career, and it’s easy to see why. This film lacks the sheer bizarreness of Marihuana: Weed with Roots in Hell or the genuine pathos of Thelma White’s performance in Reefer Madness, though on its own it’s an interesting enough look into how the anti-pot mania that still grips so many Americans was born.
The film was Assassin of Youth, third and probably least well-known of the bizarre trio of anti-marijuana movies that emerged in the mid-1930’s as part of the campaign of Harry J. Anslinger, basically America’s first “drug czar,” to make the Killer Weed illegal (and thereby preserve the jobs of all the Prohibition enforcement agents after the whole madness of trying to make alcohol illegal finally ended). The most famous of the trio is, of course, Reefer Madness (though that was a 1940’s reissue title and it was originally released as Tell Your Children and The Burning Question), though perhaps the weirdest of the bunch is Dwain Esper’s Marihuana: Weed with Roots in Hell, with its topless women (obviously these things weren’t shown in conventional theatres that had to adhere to the Production Code — usually entrepreneurs would travel with a projector and a print and set up in any venue that would have them) and weird death scene for the heroine, who literally sheds marijuana cigarettes as she’s expiring.
Assassin of Youth was produced by Leo J. McCarthy, directed by former D. W. Griffith actor Elmer Clifton and co-written by both of them, and it’s a bit more coherent plot-wise than the other two — perhaps merely because it dredges deeper into the bank of movie clichés, this time featuring a cub reporter, Art Brighton (Arthur Gardner), who’s assigned by his irascible editor (if there’s a 1930’s movie that features a newspaper editor who isn’t irascible, I’d like to know what it is) to investigate the case of Elizabeth Barry, small-town grandmother who was killed when she was run over by a car driven by marijuana-crazed youth. It turns out Elizabeth left a will leaving her entire fortune to her granddaughter Joan (Luana Walters, top-billed) but only if Joan remains a woman of good moral character. The next in line for the inheritance is Joan’s cousin Linda Clayton (Fay McKenzie), who’s already fallen far off the straight and narrow: she’s secretly married to Jack Howard (Michael Owen) — the reason for the secrecy is so Jack can set out to seduce any young woman whose ruination they decide would be profitable for Linda’s drug-dealing business.
Accordingly they set out to ruin Joan — if they can’t get her to sin for real, they figure they can at least give her a bad reputation that will ruin her in the eyes of Judge George Herbert (Henry Roquemore), who has jurisdiction over Elizabeth’s will — and the campaign starts when they get Joan to go with them and their friends to a “weenie-roast” by the town lake. Joan slips and falls into the lake (we don’t actually see this happen so we’re uncertain whether she just fell or Jack pushed her), gets her clothes wet, and Linda hangs them to dry so close to the fire they burn up (once again, we don’t see this so we can’t be sure whether this was accidental or intentional) and Joan has to go home in a coat borrowed from one of the men at the party and nothing under it. This catches the attention of town gossip Henrietta Frisbie (Fern Emmett), who drives a motor scooter (I didn’t know they had motor scooters in 1937!) instead of a bicycle but otherwise looks so much like Margaret Hamilton in the Kansas scenes of The Wizard of Oz it’s hard to believe that Wizard was actually made two years later.
Meanwhile, Art has bluffed his way into a job as a soda jerk at the drugstore owned by Henry “Pop” Brady (Earl Dwire) — Judge Herbert hangs out there and the two old men have been playing checkers, and cheating, for decades — where all the drug-crazed youth of the town also come for more salubrious refreshments. Art’s editor shows him a film-within-a-film of a lecturer talking about the evils of marijuana (this essentially serves the same function as the framing lecturer in Reefer Madness, cloaking all this decadence under the guise of “education”), and Art returns to the small town determined to uncover the suppliers who are giving Linda her merchandise. Then we learn that Joan has a sister, Marjorie (Dorothy Short, who was in Reefer Madness as well — poor girl), who’s already done so much pot she’s on the thin edge of insanity, which she proves by nearly knifing a supposed rival for her boyfriend’s affections at yet another one of the surprisingly boring “wild” parties at which most of the film takes place. Then again, maybe it’s not that surprising at all: part of the strategy behind these movies seems to have been to discourage people from slipping into the demi-monde by making the demi-monde seem hopelessly dull and simply not worth bothering with.
Jack and Linda continue their campaign to ruin Joan by feeding her drugged food and drink (there are at least two references in the dialogue to “something stronger” than marijuana, but there’s no mention of what the “something stronger” is and it’s impossible to tally the effects of whatever it is as depicted with those of any known non-fictional drug), and Art’s attempt to use Joan to entrap Linda and her suppliers goes haywire big time when Jack and Linda feed her a drugged snack, she passes out in Jack’s bed and she’s told the next day that they had sex. By sheer mischance (or authorial fiat), all this happens on the eve of the hearing over Elizabeth Barry’s will, and Joan refuses to testify; Judge Herbert is about to rule that she doesn’t get the money when Art arrives in the nick of time with the evidence against Linda and exonerates Joan, whom he plans to marry — though there’s an interesting ambiguity whether they’re going to move to the big city while Art continues his newspaper career or settle for life in the quieter small-town environment Joan has always known.
Assassin of Youth is probably the best-made of the trio — it was shot at Grand National Studios (as I suspect Reefer Madness was as well) and has a perfectly acceptable production “finish,” but virtually no one in it can actually act; Luana Walters ended up in some of the Bela Lugosi Monograms but no one else seemed to have much of a subsequent career, and it’s easy to see why. This film lacks the sheer bizarreness of Marihuana: Weed with Roots in Hell or the genuine pathos of Thelma White’s performance in Reefer Madness, though on its own it’s an interesting enough look into how the anti-pot mania that still grips so many Americans was born.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Convicted (Weiss Bros., Supreme Pictures, Artclass, 1931)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Convicted, one of several movies of that title (including a 1950 Columbia production that was the third version of The Criminal Code and got listed in The Film Noir Encyclopedia even though the editors conceded that “prison pictures are rarely noir movies”), though this was made in 1931 for a variety of studio labels — Supreme Features (as opposed to Supreme Pictures, a later company that made Westerns exclusively), Weiss Bros. and “Artclass Pictures” (not to be confused with Artcraft, a label Paramount used in the silent era to denote Mary Pickford’s films and their other prestige items) — and directed by former D. W. Griffith assistant Christy Cabanne (who worked for a long time but did not rise to the heights of other former Griffith assistants who became directors themselves, like Erich von Stroheim, Tod Browning and Raoul Walsh) from a script by Jo Van Ronkel, based on a story by Ed Barry with additional dialogue from our old Reefer Madness friend, Arthur Hoerl.
The 1931 Convicted takes place entirely on an ocean liner (except for a brief opening showing the ship docked and people getting on it) and features Aileen Pringle (a first-rate and ill-used actress who should have had a major studio career and instead graced — and improved — a lot of indies) as Claire Norvelle, an actress who just finished a run in a flop play and is taking an ocean voyage to get away from the unwelcome romantic advances of her producer, Tony Blair (Richard Tucker) — the American Film Institute Catalog synopsis (which incidentally lists this film as “not viewed”) calls him “John Blair” but both the first and last names of the later Prime Minister of Great Britain are audible on the soundtrack. Blair is also confronted on board by his former mistress, Constance (Dorothy Christy), who manages to look something like an avenging angel in her blonde hair and skin-tight black dress (she dresses considerably better than Aileen Pringle does and one wonders why Blair wants to leave her for Pringle’s character), complaining that Blair is jilting her for Claire and, since she also tells him (and us) that she’s aware he has a wife, reminding me of Robert Penn Warren’s line from All the King’s Men: “He’s already cheating on his wife with you. You need a new arithmetic to describe what he’s doing to you!”
Blair is such a slimy villain — we later learn he’s not only a failed theatrical producer but an embezzler who stole $100,000 from a company he worked for and is fleeing the country with it — he’s actually the most fun character to watch and it’s a pity he gets bumped off halfway through the film, right after he’s given Claire a white box (which, especially if we’ve seen enough other movies of this period, we assume contains a jeweled bracelet, necklace or some other incredibly expensive piece of precious gem-encrusted bric-a-brac) and she’s forthrightly turned down his gift and even refused to look inside the box to see what she’s rejecting. Claire is, as far as we know, the last person to see him alive — she hit him with a candlestick to fend off his rape attempt after she turned down his present, though apparently not hard enough to kill him — so naturally she’s suspected of the murder and told to confine herself to her stateroom for the duration of the voyage, until the ship hits port and she can be turned over to a law-enforcement agency (though the script ducks the interesting and knotty issue of just who has jurisdiction to prosecute a murder that occurs on board a civilian ship on the high seas). Needless to say, there’s a good guy, reporter Bruce Allan (Jameson Thomas), who works to solve the crime himself and incidentally falls in love with Claire, and eventually he traces it to a ship’s officer who killed Blair for his ill-gotten gains.
Convicted is simply not a good movie — it’s rather aimlessly plotted, Cabanne’s direction is straightforward and surprisingly unexciting for what’s theoretically supposed to be a mystery, and while Pringle and Christy turn in finely honed, fully credible performances, the males in the cast (except for Tucker, who as noted above is killed off way too soon) are far below their talent level. Even though it only runs 55 minutes (this was one archive.org download that came in under an hour not because the film had been edited for TV in the 1950’s but because it had been that short on its initial release!) it’s still pretty much an endurance test.
The film was Convicted, one of several movies of that title (including a 1950 Columbia production that was the third version of The Criminal Code and got listed in The Film Noir Encyclopedia even though the editors conceded that “prison pictures are rarely noir movies”), though this was made in 1931 for a variety of studio labels — Supreme Features (as opposed to Supreme Pictures, a later company that made Westerns exclusively), Weiss Bros. and “Artclass Pictures” (not to be confused with Artcraft, a label Paramount used in the silent era to denote Mary Pickford’s films and their other prestige items) — and directed by former D. W. Griffith assistant Christy Cabanne (who worked for a long time but did not rise to the heights of other former Griffith assistants who became directors themselves, like Erich von Stroheim, Tod Browning and Raoul Walsh) from a script by Jo Van Ronkel, based on a story by Ed Barry with additional dialogue from our old Reefer Madness friend, Arthur Hoerl.
The 1931 Convicted takes place entirely on an ocean liner (except for a brief opening showing the ship docked and people getting on it) and features Aileen Pringle (a first-rate and ill-used actress who should have had a major studio career and instead graced — and improved — a lot of indies) as Claire Norvelle, an actress who just finished a run in a flop play and is taking an ocean voyage to get away from the unwelcome romantic advances of her producer, Tony Blair (Richard Tucker) — the American Film Institute Catalog synopsis (which incidentally lists this film as “not viewed”) calls him “John Blair” but both the first and last names of the later Prime Minister of Great Britain are audible on the soundtrack. Blair is also confronted on board by his former mistress, Constance (Dorothy Christy), who manages to look something like an avenging angel in her blonde hair and skin-tight black dress (she dresses considerably better than Aileen Pringle does and one wonders why Blair wants to leave her for Pringle’s character), complaining that Blair is jilting her for Claire and, since she also tells him (and us) that she’s aware he has a wife, reminding me of Robert Penn Warren’s line from All the King’s Men: “He’s already cheating on his wife with you. You need a new arithmetic to describe what he’s doing to you!”
Blair is such a slimy villain — we later learn he’s not only a failed theatrical producer but an embezzler who stole $100,000 from a company he worked for and is fleeing the country with it — he’s actually the most fun character to watch and it’s a pity he gets bumped off halfway through the film, right after he’s given Claire a white box (which, especially if we’ve seen enough other movies of this period, we assume contains a jeweled bracelet, necklace or some other incredibly expensive piece of precious gem-encrusted bric-a-brac) and she’s forthrightly turned down his gift and even refused to look inside the box to see what she’s rejecting. Claire is, as far as we know, the last person to see him alive — she hit him with a candlestick to fend off his rape attempt after she turned down his present, though apparently not hard enough to kill him — so naturally she’s suspected of the murder and told to confine herself to her stateroom for the duration of the voyage, until the ship hits port and she can be turned over to a law-enforcement agency (though the script ducks the interesting and knotty issue of just who has jurisdiction to prosecute a murder that occurs on board a civilian ship on the high seas). Needless to say, there’s a good guy, reporter Bruce Allan (Jameson Thomas), who works to solve the crime himself and incidentally falls in love with Claire, and eventually he traces it to a ship’s officer who killed Blair for his ill-gotten gains.
Convicted is simply not a good movie — it’s rather aimlessly plotted, Cabanne’s direction is straightforward and surprisingly unexciting for what’s theoretically supposed to be a mystery, and while Pringle and Christy turn in finely honed, fully credible performances, the males in the cast (except for Tucker, who as noted above is killed off way too soon) are far below their talent level. Even though it only runs 55 minutes (this was one archive.org download that came in under an hour not because the film had been edited for TV in the 1950’s but because it had been that short on its initial release!) it’s still pretty much an endurance test.
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