Torch Song (MGM, 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, December 8) my husband Charles and I stayed in and watched a run of films on Turner Classic Movies, starting with the 1953 Joan Crawford vehicle Torch Song. Directed by Charles Walters, who also appears in the opening scene as Crawford’s dance partner – she chews him out for tripping over her leg – and written by John Michael Hayes and Jan Lustig from a story by I. A. R. Wylie, Torch Song marked Crawford’s return to MGM after 11 years and a particularly bitter parting. It casts Crawford as temperamental Broadway star “Jenny Stewart,” who systematically alienates everyone around her with her diva antics. She meets her comeuppance when her accompanist, Charles Maylor (Benny Rubin), walks out on her in the middle of rehearsals for her new show because he’s had enough of her imperious attitude. Her producer lines up a replacement in the person of Tye Graham (Michael Wilding, best known then and now mostly as the second Mr. Elizabeth Taylor rather than for his own talents), who shows up and knows all her songs by heart. It turns out he had to learn them that way because, after a brief career as a theatrical critic – in which he reviewed Jenny Stewart’s Broadway debut singing the song “Tenderly” by Jack Lawrence and Walter Gross – he went to serve in World War II and got blinded. Tye shows up with a seeing-eye dog called “Duchess” and Jenny rather bitterly jokes that what he really needs is a seeing-eye girlfriend. Tye actually has one – Martha (Dorothy Patrick), who plays guitar in the informal jam band Tye likes to play with in his off-hours – but proximity works its predictable magic and Tye and Jenny fall more or less in love. Experiencing Tye’s disability first-hand – there’s a marvelous sequence in which Jenny tries to light a cigarette with her eyes closed and burns her fingers, which seemingly explains why Tye only smokes pipes – humbles Jenny and makes her human.

Torch Song was billed as Joan Crawford’s first film in color, which it was and it wasn’t; it was the first movie she made entirely in color, but she’d appeared in color sequences in three previous films: Hollywood Revue of 1929, Ice Follies of 1939, and The Women (also 1939). Equipped with a head of flaming red hair by MGM stylist Sidney Guilaroff (who also had the idea of dyeing Lucille Ball’s hair red), Jenny Stewart has a fierce mien that reinforces François Truffaut’s comment in his review of Johnny Guitar (made a year later) that Crawford was looking more masculine in each new film. She was also equipped with a voice double, India Adams, who had previously sung for Cyd Charisse in the 1953 film The Band Wagon with Fred Astaire. In fact, Crawford’s big dance number, a blackface workout to the Arthur Schwartz-Howard Dietz song “Two-Faced Woman,” was originally intended for Charisse in The Band Wagon, and the makers of Torch Song simply recycled the recording Adams had made for Charisse and had Crawford mime to it instead. (The compilation film That’s Entertainment III contained a split-screen showing of both Charisse’s and Crawford’s performances to this recording.) Crawford was predictably unhappy with MGM’s decision to give her a voice double; in Hollywood Revue of 1929 and the 1933 musical Dancing Lady (in which she was Fred Astaire’s first on-screen dance partner; most people assume it was Ginger Rogers, but it was actually Joan Crawford!) she had sung quite acceptably herself. It’s possible MGM’s “suits,” producers Henry Berman, Sidney Franklin and Charles Schnee, didn’t think Crawford’s voice as of 1953 was up to snuff even though it had been two decades earlier.

There’s one odd sequence in which Crawford reminiscences about her performance of “Tenderly” a decade earlier and plays the record of the song she’d made then, and it’s not clear the two singers are the same because the supposedly old record featured a higher-lying and younger-sounding voice even though the imdb.com page for Torch Song claims it’s India Adams on both. Torch Song builds to an all too predictable ending in which Jenny Stewart and Tye Graham pair up personally, though the impression I had was it was going to be both a professional and a romantic partnership. That wasn’t how Carol Burnett, who guest-hosted the TCM showing, did it in 1977 when she parodied Torch Song on her CBS-TV variety show as Torchy Song. In Burnett’s version the pianist (Harvey Korman) is merely near-sighted instead of totally blind – he’s wearing super-thick glasses and constantly stumbling into things – and the routine ends with the two of them singing about how she’s going to give up her career and just be a housewife … until he starts mentioning having kids, and all of a sudden she bails on the promise of domesticity and changes the song to insist she’s going to continue her career, and when the pianist resists she and her choristers lock him inside her grand piano. Burnett and TCM host Dave Karger co-MC’d this showing and they ran Burnett’s 1977 Torchy Song parody right after the original film – even though Torch Song was a fairly obscure film and hardly at the iconic level of Gone With the Wind, Rebecca, Sunset Boulevard and most of the other films they’d parodied on Burnett’s show.

The Life of the Party (Paramount, 1920)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Torch Song Turner Classic Movies did their usual “Silent Sunday Showcase,” featuring two films by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle: the feature-length The Life of the Party (1920) and a Mack Sennett Keystone two-reeler from 1915, Fatty’s Tintype Tangle. The Life of the Party was actually a quite sophisticated farce with a notable anti-capitalist theme. Written by Irwin S. Cobb (who also hosted the first Academy Awards banquet) and directed by Joseph Henabery (who played Abraham Lincoln in D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation, in which he was assassinated by fellow future director Raoul Walsh as John Wilkes Booth), The Life of the Party casts Arbuckle as aspiring attorney Algernon Leary. The locale is a fictional city called “Cosmopolis” in which an evil Milk Trust is using gangster-style tactics to drive competing dairies out of business and push up the price of milk to levels that threaten the health of Cosmopolis’s babies. Leary has a big office safe in which he keeps a stash of booze (Prohibition had just come into at least nominal effect when this film was made and many of the liquor bottles still have above-board labels on them) which he and his law partner, Sam Perkins (Roscoe Karns, a marvelous character actor who made the silent-to-sound transition easily and kept working until 1964, six years before his death), imbibe extensively despite the shocked looks of his staff members who keep coming in on him as he’s trying to drink. Leary had previously applied to the Milk Trust to be their attorney. The Trust has already got the local judge, Voris (Frank Campeau) – whose first name keeps changing from “Thomas” to “Frank” and back – in their pocket.

The Milk Trust’s only opponents are a women’s group called the Better Babies Bureau consisting of the usual assortment of dowager widows as well as one attractive young single woman, Millicent Hollister (Viora Daniel), with whom Leary immediately falls in love even though she’s already engaged to Judge Voris. There’s a nice scene showing how good an actor Arbuckle could be when he hesitantly fingers a $5,000 check the Milk Trust’s CEO has sending him as a retainer, then decides that love is better than money and gallantly tears up the Milk Trust’s check to take the side of the Better Babies Bureau against the Trust instead. In his first court appearance before Judge Voris – whom we know, though Leary doesn’t, is in the pocket of the Milk Trust – there’s a surprising dialogue exchange in the intertitles in which Voris asks Leary, “Are you trying to show contempt for this court?” Leary replies, “No, Your Honor. I’m doing my best to hide it” – an exchange I’d always assumed was created by Mae West for one of her films a decade and a half later. Ultimately the Milk Trust decides to run Judge Voris for mayor of Cosmopolis, and the Better Babies Bureau enlists Leary to run as a reform candidate against him. Millicent invites Leary to a weird theme party in which all the guests are supposed to come dressed as children, and he’s worried that if anyone sees him in baby clothes his political career will be ruined by the scandal. It’s a grimly ironic scene given that two years later Arbuckle’s career would abruptly end in scandal following a wild party of his own he hosted in San Francisco which ended in the mysterious death of starlet Virginia Rappé and Arbuckle enduring three trials for her alleged murder. Leary tries to make it home after the party and a hold-up man steals his overcoat, leaving him in the middle of the street in a heavy snowstorm wearing nothing but his Buster Browns. Ultimately Judge Voris withdraws from the mayor’s race for fear of being exposed for his corruption, and Leary is elected and proposes to Millicent – only, unsurprisingly, he’s caught a cold from his walk home in the snowstorm and his marriage proposal is interrupted by fits of sneezing.

The Life of the Party was preserved and restored by the Library of Congress, though the last few feet were missing from the extant print and had to be filled in from still photos taken on set. The Life of the Party is surprising in a number of respects: instead of acting as his own director, as Arbuckle had in most of his shorts for Mack Sennett and Joseph Schenck (in the later series Arbuckle enlisted a supporting player named Joseph “Buster” Keaton, who later said his only lessons in directing had come from watching Arbuckle do it), he was given Joseph Henabery to direct and an elaborate pre-set scenario that left him little room to improvise. The Life of the Party is essentially a Frank Capra movie almost two decades early (remember that Capra got his start as a gag man for Sennett and knew Arbuckle; in later years Capra said he admired Arbuckle for being ambidextrous and being able to throw pies in two different directions with each arm). It also breaks with Arbuckle’s usual casting as a working-class man (I’ve noted that the greatest silent comics all seemed to have set themselves up in different niches along America’s class system: Charlie Chaplin as the lower-class “Tramp,” Arbuckle as working-class, Harold Lloyd as middle-class and Keaton as upper-class) in that he’s a legal professional and spent more money than he can afford on an elaborate office as a “front.” Though his shift to feature films under Paramount’s supervision had cost him much of his creative control, Arbuckle is still quite a performer and gets plenty of opportunities for pratfalls. The imdb.com page on The Life of the Party credits Al St. John as Arbuckle’s stunt double, but that’s hard to believe: St. John was a frequent comic villain in Arbuckle’s films for Sennett and Schenck and he was a tall, lanky man who’s hardly likely to have been able to double for the legendarily large Arbuckle, who hated the nickname “Fatty” and whenever he was addressed by it, he’d angrily correct the speaker and say, “I do have a name! It’s Roscoe!” The imdb.com page also quotes a news item from the Spartanburg Herald in Spartanburg, South Carolina from January 1921 that the Rex Theatre was inviting “Fat Folks Free” as a promotion for this movie; they put a scale in the lobby and if you weighed 225 pounds or more, you got to see the movie free.

Fatty's Tintype Tangle (Keystone, 1915)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Following The Life of the Party Turner Classic Movies showed a much more typical Arbuckle film: Fatty’s Tintype Tangle, made for Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio in 1915 and casting Arbuckle as a much put-upon husband who gets a continued stream of abuses not only from his wife (Norma Nichols) but his imperious mother-in-law (Mai Wells). He’s driven out of his apartment by these two formidable women and stumbles his way to the local park, where he meets a tintype photographer (Josef Swickard, best known as Rudolph Valentino’s father in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) and a couple from Alaska (Edgar Kennedy and Louise Fazenda, both considerably younger and sexier than we’re used to seeing them). The photographer catches Arbuckle and Fazenda in a pose that makes it look like they’re romantically involved, and of course Kennedy gets inflamed with jealousy and goes after Arbuckle with a gun, shooting at him seemingly at random. (A number of Sennett’s films, including the feature-length Tillie’s Punctured Romance, have this National Rifle Association’s wet dream of a world in which people routinely carry guns around everywhere they go and randomly shoot at each other, albeit without ever actually hurting or wounding anyone.) At the climax, Arbuckle is trapped on a batch of electrical power cords which bounce him up and down. He’s cornered on them because Kennedy is there with his omnipresent guns (and seemingly endless supply of ammunition), ready to slaughter him if he tries to come down. Fatty’s Tintype Tangle is a reliably amusing slapstick fest and also something of a situation comedy; for once the designation “Farce Comedy” on the opening title of a Keystone comedy seems to make sense.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (Escape Artists, Mundy Lane Entertainment, Netflix, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Friday, December 6), on the last night my husband Charles and I spent with his mother Edi in Martinez, California, the three of us watched a quite good if a bit “precious” movie on Netflix, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. It was made in 2020 and was the last feature-film credit for the awesome and tragically short-lived Black actor and star Chadwick Boseman, who’s best known for his role as T’Challa, the Black Panther, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and the 2018 Black Panther film remains far and away the best-ever film based on a comic-book superhero character; Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman is the only other one that even comes close). It’s based on a real-life recording session by the great blues singer Gertrude Malissa Nix Pridgett Rainey, billed as “Ma Rainey” on her records and nicknamed “Mother of the Blues.” Rainey is played by an equally major star, Viola Davis, though she had a vocal double, Maxayn Lewis, for almost all the film. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (the movie, not the song) began life as a play by August Wilson, one of 10 plays he wrote as the so-called Century Cycle because each one would tell a story from the African-American experience in a specific decade of the 20th century. The film follows a group of musicians assembled in Chicago in 1927 (the opening credit lists July 2 as the date but the actual recording session was in December) to back Ma Rainey on four blues songs: “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Moonshine Blues,” “Hear Me Talking To You” and “Prove It On Me Blues.” (Actually only the first two were recorded in December 1927; “Hear Me Talking” and “Prove It On Me Blues,” the latter an outrageously open Lesbian song in which Rainey declares that the friends she was out with the night before “must have been women, ’cause I don’t like no men,” were from a later Rainey session on June 12, 1928.) The central conflict in the story is between Rainey and Levee (Chadwick Boseman), her trumpet player, who doesn’t like the old-fashioned jug-band music Rainey wants her band to play and dreams of a future in which he leads his own band and plays the kind of sophisticated jazz he dreams of. He’s left a few songs of his own with Sturdyvant (Jonny Coyne), the white owner of Hot Rhythm Records, for which Rainey records, with vague promises that Sturdyvant will give him his own record deal.

Levee is also cruising Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige) even though Dussie Mae is not only Ma’s personal assistant but also her girlfriend de jour. The other musicians in Rainey’s band, trombonist Cutler (Colman Domingo), pianist Toledo (Glynn Turman), and bassist “Slow Drag” (Michael Potts), just want to get the records done so they can get paid and get out of the studio. They get tired of Ma’s diva-esque antics, including demanding an ice-cold Coca-Cola before she’ll open her mouth to sing and insisting that her stuttering nephew Sylvester (Dusan Brown) deliver the spoken introduction to the song “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” In one of the film’s most powerful lines Ma says, “They don't care nothin’ about me. All they want is my voice. Well, I done learned that. And they gonna treat me the way I wanna be treated, no matter how much it hurt them.” Sylvester blows six takes of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” with his stuttering, and the one take on which he gets it right doesn’t come out because of a faulty mike cord – and Rainey angrily stalks out of the studio and tells Sturdyvant he has 15 minutes to get the equipment working properly or she’s going to collect her band (except for Levee, whom she’s already decided to fire) and go back to Georgia to tour. While Rainey is out of the studio, Levee has an angry confrontation with Toledo, who gets upset over Levee’s lack of a belief in God. Levee pulls a knife on him and says if there is a God, He will strike the knife from his hand and save Toledo’s life. Later, after the session is finished and Sturdyvant and Ma’s white manager Irwin (Jeremy Shamos), are high-fiving each other and congratulating themselves on making sure-fire hits, Levee stabs Toledo in the back and then watches as Toledo bleeds out and dies in his arms. The final scene shows Sturdyvant in the studio with a white band recording one of Levee’s songs, in an absurdly anemic version, after he’d told Levee that he’d pay him only $5 for each because he didn’t think they had commercial potential.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a flawed movie; Wilson and his screenwriter, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, seem to be trying too hard in getting just about every aspect of racism and anti-Black oppression they could cram into the story. It also doesn’t help that director George C. Wolfe and cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler went way overboard on the past-is-brown look, though at least the film is set mostly in confined spaces and that makes it difficult for the actors’ brown faces and the brown backgrounds to blend into each other the way they have in other past-is-brown films whose protagonists are Black (can you say Selma?). What makes this film great despite its overwrought aspects is the finely honed acting, particularly by Davis and Boseman. Davis brings the right note of imperiousness to Rainey’s character; she’s a woman who’s sure of herself and is well aware of her own talents and box-office power. And Boseman is a live wire; he’s not only younger than the other players in Rainey’s band, he’s energetic and determined to make a success on his own terms rather than as accompanist to a singer with a style he considers out of date. (I wondered whether August Wilson was thinking of Louis Armstrong, who as a young man backed Ma Rainey on her most famous song, “See, See Rider,” which she wrote and which later became a blues and rock standard. But the real-life Armstrong never had the kind of chip on his shoulder the fictional Levee did.) Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom also gets at least most of the recording technology right; by 1927 most records were being made electrically (with microphones and a sound console feeding a record-cutting machine), and though electrical technology was central to the process the cutting turntables were still turned by clockwork power because line voltage was not reliable enough to turn the recorder at a constant speed and avoid wow and flutter. Anachronistically, though, the blanks on which the recordings are made are made of lacquer-covered metal instead of wax (as we’re shown in a grim scene in which a wastebasket in the studio fills up from all the takes Sylvester has ruined with his stuttering); lacquer wasn’t introduced until the 1930’s.

Act of Violence (MGM, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

This morning (Sunday, December 8) I watched a movie I was hoping my husband Charles and I would get to watch together last night, though due to the vagaries of local bus schedules we didn’t get back from our out-of-town trip in time: Act of Violence, a 1948 film noir made at MGM (which sounds like a contradiction in terms right there!), directed by Fred Zinnemann from a script by Robert L. Richards based on a story by Collier Young. Collier Young was an aspiring screenwriter and producer who married a major Hollywood star, Ida Lupino, and co-founded a company called The Filmakers (only one “m”). According to Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller, Young originally wrote the story as a project for Mark Hellinger’s production unit at Universal, only once Hellinger died suddenly on the eve of shooting for Criss Cross Universal put the project in turnaround. MGM acquired it mainly due to their newly hired production chief, Dore Schary, who’d been brought in after he ran afoul of Howard Hughes at RKO at least in part to update MGM’s output and get some more noir projects going. MGM’s long-time production head, Louis B. Mayer, predictably hated film noir; referencing the 1947 classic Kiss of Death, he said, “Kick an old lady down a flight of stairs, and they call that art?” Art or not, it was what a lot of late-1940’s movie audiences wanted to pay to see, and Act of Violence gave it to them in spades. Ironically, one of the flaws of Act of Violence mirrors one of the problems with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: it’s trying so hard to be “socially significant” that the moral and political commentary gets away from the sheer thrill of the story. That was a common weakness of Dore Schary – he green-lighted so many socially significant films the joke was, “He’s selling out MGM for a pot of message” – and also of Collier Young, who took the money he got for the story for Act of Violence and used it to set up Not Wanted, the first The Filmakers production, a story of unwed motherhood. (Not Wanted’s direction was credited to silent-era veteran Elmer Clifton, but he had a heart attack after the first week of shooting and Ida Lupino took over the direction herself; she later went on to some quite challenging social-comment films, including Outrage, The Bigamist and her greatest film as a director, The Hitch-Hiker.)

Act of Violence starts in the bucolic small town of Santa Lisa, in which returning World War II veteran Frank R. Enley (Van Heflin) has created a company to build homes for fellow veterans and has become a local hero. There’s even a parade for him in progress as the film opens. Alas, he’s got a dirty little secret in his war past, which comes to town to haunt him in the person of disabled fellow veteran Joe Parkson (Robert Ryan). Joe is shown in the opening scenes of the film carefully loading a handgun and concealing it on his person, then taking a bus from Los Angeles to Santa Lisa. Once he arrives, he goes to Enley’s house and stalks him. When he finds out Enley is out of town on a fishing trip, he browbeats Enley’s wife Edith (a very young Janet Leigh) and their two-year-old son George (Larry and Leslie Holt, obviously following the common dodge of casting identical twins as a pre-pubescent character to avoid breaking California’s strict laws on how many hours per day a child can work). She lets him know where Frank is, and Frank abruptly cuts short his fishing trip to head home when he recognizes Joe stalking him on the lake in a rented boat. Frank learns that Joe has told Edith his secret: when the two were prisoners of war in 1944 being starved by the Germans who were holding them, Joe and the others planned an escape through a tunnel. Frank blew the whistle and told the Nazi camp commandant about the escape attempt. The commandant promised Frank the escapees would be treated leniently, but of course he was lying: instead the Germans were waiting for the 11 men as they came out of the tunnel and bayoneted them, leaving them to die slow and painful deaths. Joe was the only one who survived, but the incident left him with a permanent limp (Muller said after the movie that a lot of film historians have said it was Robert Ryan’s idea to have the character limp, but the limp is mentioned in all the extant copies of the script) that becomes a physical metaphor for his psychologically twisted character. Frank has an out-of-town builders’ and contractors’ convention he was planning to attend, but Joe’s omnipresence leads him to leave town a few days early, and there are some great scenes (anticipating the similar use of a convention in the film D.O.A. a year later) in which Joe is stalking Frank through the forced gaiety of a convention, while Edith is also trying to find her husband and warn him of what he’s up against. Ultimately Frank and Edith confront each other and Frank confesses that Joe’s accusations against him are true.

Frank wanders the mean streets of L.A. and ultimately gets picked up in a bar by Pat (Mary Astor), the proverbial whore-with-a-heart-of-gold, who introduces him to a corrupt lawyer and fixer named Gavery (Taylor Holmes). Frank, who has previously offered to give up his business (whose worth he estimates as $20,000) and transfer it to Joe to repay him and get him off his back, is told by Gavery that he can hire a hit man, Johnny (Berry Kroeger), for $10,000 to get Joe off his back … permanently. (After the recent murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson by an unknown gunman on the streets of New York, this aspect of the plot seemed all too timely today!) At one point Frank stands in the middle of the L.A. rail yards and stands on a track while a train comes barreling down at him, but he steps away just in time. It all climaxes at the Santa Lisa train station, where Johnny is supposed to show up and kill Joe, only Frank runs out on his wife and child to make it to the train station. Frank saves Joe’s life by stepping in front of Johnny and taking the fatal bullet himself, thereby fulfilling the iron law of the Production Code that, no matter how sympathetic he seemed in the rest of his life, he had to pay for his one moment of evil. (This left me wondering what’s going to happen to Frank’s business and all the veterans who were depending on him to supply them housing, though I mentally remixed the film’s ending so Edith would take over and show unexpected skills as a businessperson.) I have vague memories of seeing Act of Violence on a previous go-round back in the days of VHS, when I used to tape TCM by the proverbial yard before the Tech and Media Gods got rid of the technology, but I liked it this time considerably more than I had then. It’s true that the social-comment aspects of the story still tend to drag it down, but Zinnemann’s direction is powerfully understated (and very Hitchcockian; the ending in particular reminded me of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, and there’s even a key scene involving a confrontation on a staircase). Also, like Shadow of a Doubt, though the film is called Act of Violence there is no on-screen act of violence until the very end. There’s also the obligatory shot of the Angel’s Flight railway that was ubiquitous in L.A.-set noirs – back when it still worked!

Act of Violence is also quite unusual in that it has no opening credits except for the film’s title; all the other credits are at the end, which is standard practice today but was highly unusual in 1948. And the supporting cast is unusually good; Eddie Muller gave particular praise to Mary Astor but I thought the standouts among the down-list cast were Phyllis Thaxter as Joe’s girlfriend Ann (who pleads with him not to do anything stupid, like killing Frank, that will ruin their future prospects); and Berry Kroeger as the sinister hit-man Johnny, who in his disinterested understatement seems to have wandered in from a film made a decade later. Of course one can’t watch Act of Violence without thinking of Mary Astor from her role in The Maltese Falcon seven years earlier – though the two parts couldn’t be more different – and Janet Leigh from her role in Psycho 12 years later, another movie in which she was stalked by a crazy killer!

The Scar of Shame (Colored Players Film Corporation, Sack Amusement Enterprises, 1927, released 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, December 1) Turner Classic Movies showed a quite haunting and surprisingly good if uneven film called The Scar of Shame, made in 1927 (but not released until 1929) for the sadly short-lived Colored Players Film Corporation of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This enterprise was founded by two unlikely partners, Black vaudevillian and minstrel Sherman “Uncle Dud” Dudley and white theatre owner David Starkman. Starkman’s theatre was located in a predominantly Black neighborhood and he wanted to give his audiences films that more accurately reflected the Black experience than the productions of white Hollywood, which all too often fell back on racist stereotypes in their depictions of Blacks. The company made four films: A Prince of His Race (1926), a revamping of the old stage hit Ten Nights in a Barroom with an all-Black cast (1926), Children of Fate (1927) and this one. Alas, only Ten Nights in a Barroom and The Scar of Shame survive, though at least The Scar of Shame, after decades during which it was thought to be lost, turned up in a complete nitrate print with the original credits and intertitles. Like a lot of other independent film companies, Colored Players Film Corporation went under when sound came in and they couldn’t afford the vastly more expensive equipment needed to make talkies. The Scar of Shame was both written and directed by whites: David Starkman wrote the script and the director and cinematographer, Frank Perugini and Al Liguori, were both Italian-Americans. Black film historian Donald Bogle has called The Scar of Shame the best independent silent film ever made by African-Americans – which seems to me damned unfair to Oscar Micheaux, the pioneering Black filmmaker. I’ve seen two of Micheaux’s silents, Within Our Gates (1920) (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/02/within-our-gates-micheaux-book-and-film.html) and Body and Soul (1925) (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/02/body-and-soul-micheaux-book-and-film.html), and both of them I liked considerably better than The Scar of Shame even though The Scar of Shame is quite an estimable film.

It starts out in the Philadelphia boarding house of Mrs. Lucretia Green (Ann Kennedy, who doesn’t look particularly Black) with an argument between two of her roomers, serious (i.e., classical) Black composer Alvin Hillyard (Harry Henderson) and scapegrace bad guy Eddie Blake (Norman Johnstone). The two later fight over the affections of Louise Howard (Lucia Lynn Moses, a quite remarkable actress whose only film this was, though afterwards she had a long career as a stage actress), who’s rescued by Alvin from the clutches of her abusive father, “Spike” (William E. Pettus). Though Alvin’s mother back home (wherever he’s from) has another woman, Helen Smith, picked out for him to marry, he marries Louise not because he’s in love with her but to save her from that nasty man who sired her. Alvin doesn’t want Louise to meet his mother (whom we never see on screen) because she’ll resent the fact that he married below his “caste” – the Indian-derived word is actually used in the intertitles – while Eddie plans to kidnap her and install her as the star attraction in a cabaret/casino, where she’ll be a B-girl. Ernest gets “Spike” to help him with the kidnapping by plying him with bad Prohibition booze (“Spike” is an alcoholic) and hiring him as his lookout. He lures Alvin out of the rooming house by sending him a fake telegram that his mother is deathly ill, and once he’s gone he swoops in. In the film’s best scene, out of resentment that Alvin has abandoned her and doesn’t think she’s good enough for his family, Louise tears up his photo of his mother and also their marriage license, and takes off her wedding ring. Alvin learns from his mom’s Black butler that she’s perfectly all right, and he races back to Philadelphia – only when he arrives at his and Louise’s home, Eddie is already there. The two men confront each other and draw guns (one wonders what a nice guy like Alvin was doing going around with a gun), and Louise ends up wounded with the titular “scar of shame,” a scar across her face that the intertitles tell us ruined her natural beauty (though she looks about the same pre- and post-wounding).

Alvin is arrested and goes to prison for assault, though he escapes by sawing through the bars of his cell (relatively easily) and flees to another city, where he establishes himself as music teacher “Arthur Jones.” He also falls genuinely in love with one of his students, Alice Hathaway (Pearl McCormack), which gets complicated not only because he’s still legally married to Louise but because she’s the daughter of local attorney, fixer and all-around big shot Ralph Hathaway (Laurence Chenault). Among other projects, Ralph pulls strings with the local politicians to make sure Eddie (ya remember Eddie?) is allowed to operate the Lido Club cabaret and casino openly. Sure enough, we get a glimpse of the Lido Club, a riotous establishment with a resident jazz band led by Sid Stratton – we know it’s a jazz band because we get an inset close-up of one of its members playing a saxophone, and we’re obviously supposed to get the point that the “bad” characters listen to jazz while the “good” ones listen to the sort of lace-curtain songs Alvin is presumably composing. I was particularly interested in the Lido Club scenes because the imdb.com page on this film listed the great Black stage actor Charles Gilpin as playing one of the gamblers. Gilpin created the lead role of Brutus Jones in Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones in 1920 and played it successfully both on Broadway and on tour until 1925, when he and O’Neill had a falling-out over O’Neill’s use of the “N-word” in the play. Gilpin wanted O’Neill to rewrite the script to take it out, and O’Neill insisted that as part of his artistic intent, it had to stay in. So O’Neill replaced Gilpin in the role with Paul Robeson, who for all his vaunted Left-wing politics wasn’t as persnickety about the “N-word” as Gilpin had been. Judging from the on-line photos of Gilpin I’ve seen, he was almost certainly the big heavy-set man, cigar in his mouth, at the far left of a sequence showing a poker game at the Lido Club.

The club itself is surprising because it shows both men and women gambling, albeit at separate tables, and Eddie is quite obviously cheating at the poker games, using Louise to spy on the other players (she can see what cards they’re holding with the mirror in her compact). Louise confronts Alvin when he comes to the club and demands that he move in with her and treat her as his wife, but when he refuses she writes a series of notes to the other principals (this part of the film anticipates the current Lifetime movies in which much of the exposition is done by showing the characters’ text messages to each other on screen) explaining that a) it was Eddie, not Alvin, who fired the shot that wounded her, and therefore Alvin should be legally exonerated; b) she realizes Alvin never really loved her and married her only to get her away from that creep of a father; and c) she doesn’t want to stand in the way of Alvin’s happiness with Alice. Then she takes poison and kills herself. Eddie, the rotter he is, tears up the letter Louise wrote him (there are a lot of scenes in this movie that involve the tearing up of documents), but enough of her message seeps through that Alvin and Alice are altar-bound at the end and Alvin is legally exonerated and paired with a woman who will pass muster with his overly class-conscious mother. There are long titles at both the beginning and the end that state that Louise was a basically good woman, but because of the lousy environment she grew up in she was doomed to live a life of shame and not develop her better qualities.

The Scar of Shame is basically a good movie, but there are problems with it. Not only does it depict the Black community as incredibly class-conscious (frankly, through most of the film I was rooting for Alvin and Louise to get together as a couple, make their marriage work, and tell Alvin’s snobby mom to go to hell), it also follows the usual iconography of “race” movies that reflected the bizarre internal racism within the African-American community. The “good” characters are all relatively light-skinned; the darker ones are relegated to villains. Quite a few Black songs of the period divide the African-American world into “yellow,” “brown” and “black,” with the so-called “high yellows” – Blacks who looked almost white and frequently “passed” – depicted as unusually dangerous and amoral, though the “race” filmmakers generally went the other way and presented the lighter-skinned characters as good and the darker-skinned ones as evil. Frank Perugini’s direction is uneven; there are some quite striking visual effects, including the abstract shot of wedding bells as Alvin and Louise get married and some proto-noir shots of Alvin in his prison cell as he gets ready to escape, but there are also long tableau shots with the camera seemingly miles away from the actors and suddenly The Scar of Shame looks like a film from 1915 instead of 1927.

At least Perugini managed to get good performances from his actors; Lucia Lynn Moses in particular is such a striking visual presence it seems amazing that she never made another movie. But he was not a state-of-the-art silent director the way Oscar Micheaux was, and all too much of The Scar of Shame reflects the preachiness that afflicted Micheaux’s films as well (especially once sound came in and Micheaux’s characters started actually saying the long-winded messages of racial uplift he had previously put into intertitles) without Micheaux’s compensating vitality as a filmmaker. Also, at least two of the actors in The Scar of Shame, Harry Henderson and Laurence Chenault, also worked for Micheaux. The Scar of Shame remains a fascinating curio, and it’s nice to know that by 1927 there was enough of a middle class, and even an upper class, in the Black community they could reproduce some of the same insane social snobbery that powered white stories like Stella Dallas. But while there are strong moments of power and dramatic honesty in it, it’s not that great a movie and certainly is not in the same league as Micheaux’s Within Our Gates or Body and Soul.

Naked Alibi (Universal-International, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, November 30) my husband Charles and I watched a surprisingly good entry on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” on Turner Classic Movies: Naked Alibi (1954), directed by Jerry Hopper from a script by Lawrence Roman based on an “original” story called “Cry Copper” (a title Muller ridiculed) by J. Robert Bren and Gladys Atwater. It turned out to be considerably better than I’d thought from Muller’s introduction and the review by “bmacv” on imdb.com: “Naked Alibi wastes some potentially terrific talents by forcing them into last-ditch, half-hearted retreads of characters and situations that had already, by 1954 and halfway down the leeward slope of the noir cycle, been done to death – often, in fact, done by these very same actors.” Naked Alibi starts with a scene in a police station in which Al Willis (Gene Barry), a local baker, is rousted by the cops of a medium-sized Southern California city by Lt. Fred Parks (Max Showalter, billed as “Casey Adams”) for being drunk in public. The commander of this particular precinct, Joseph E. Conroy (Sterling Hayden, top-billed), takes an instant dislike to Willis for reasons the writers don’t bother to explain, and he and Parks try to beat him into confessing to heaven knows what. The next day Lt. Parks is murdered with a small-caliber Mauser gun (a weapon sufficiently odd that Conroy is convinced no other person in the city could have one) and Conroy immediately orders Willis arrested for the crime, but without evidence he’s ordered by police chief A. S. Babcock (Stuart Randall) to let Willis go. The night after that two more police officers are killed when a bomb planted on their patrol car goes off, and Conroy is now more convinced than ever that Willis killed all three officers. Willis is once again taken into custody, though this time his wife Helen (Marcia Henderson) calls his attorney, Gerald Frazier (Paul Levitt).

For the first half-hour Naked Alibi comes off as a modern-dress version of Les Misèrables, with Willis the seemingly innocent young family man (he has not only a wife but a son who still uses a crib) put upon by an obsessed cop with a vendetta against him. When a paparazzo catches a photo of Conroy browbeating Willis in his bakery and pushing him uncomfortably close to an open fire, it gets published and Conroy is fired from the police force. But he’s so determined to get Willis he hires a private detective, Matt Matthews (Don Haggerty), to have Willis tailed 24/7 and to make the surveillance obvious enough so Willis will notice it. At this point I joked, “Sterling Hayden wasn’t this crazy in Dr. Strangelove, and in that movie he started World War III!” Then the action cuts to “Border City,” a town just over the U.S.-Mexico border where Willis has fled after telling his wife he has to take one of his regular “business trips” out of town. We see Willis head to a bar called El Perico (which means “the parakeet”) and give an intense embrace to the bar’s singer, Marianna (Gloria Grahame, who only enters 35 minutes into the movie but dominates it from then on). From the moment we see that we know that Willis is not only an adulterer but the psycho killer Conroy said he was, though we’re still left in the dark wondering, “How did Conroy know?” Conroy follows Willis into Border City, gets panhandled by a local boy named Petey (Billy Chapin), and is ultimately beaten up by three thugs who turn out later to be in Willis’s employ. Petey takes him to his friend Marianna, who nurses him to health – it’s sheer coincidence that the fired cop ends up in the apartment of the mistress of the man he’s looking for – but then tries to drug him with sleeping powders in his milk and coffee.

Once he comes to and is well enough to move around again, Conroy resumes his hunt for Willis, who in some surprisingly graphic scenes for a 1954 Code-era movie physically beats up Marianna on more than one occasion. Marianna, the kind of femme fatale who’s amoral rather than immoral – she doesn’t really care that much what sort of man she’s with as long as he protects her and doesn’t beat her up – makes a play for Conroy. Ultimately Conroy kidnaps Willis and he and Marianna, whose ultimate loyalties remain uncertain, take him by force back across the border to the U.S. They end up hiding inside a freight truck delivering vegetables and fruit and stay there until the driver hears two shots from his freight compartment and investigates to see what they are. Willis grabs the chance to escape, knowing that his men back in Mexico have already reported his kidnapping and if the cops get involved, it’ll be Conroy that they’ll arrest. Conroy has become convinced that Willis hid the gun with which he shot Lt. Parks inside the Community Church, a nondenominational outfit literally open 24/7, and he’s hoping Willis will go there, try to extract the gun, and Conroy can catch him with it and nail him for Parks’s murder. Only the plan’s success is contingent on Conroy getting to the church before Willis does, which he doesn’t because the police detain him. Instead it’s Marianna who goes to the church to try to entrap her abusive ex-boyfriend, though both Conroy and the people still on the city’s official police force corner him there. The film ends with a big gun battle taking place across various city roofs – anticipating the opening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo by four years – in which Willis falls to his death and Marianna gets mortally wounded, though not before giving Conroy a big send-off scene telling him she wishes she’d met him earlier under better circumstances.

There are a lot of things wrong with Naked Alibi, starting with the deceptively lurid title, including the the sloppy construction of Roman’s script and the plywood cheapness of the sets. Universal-International’s publicity department made a big deal of how they allegedly went to Tijuana for location scenes in Mexico, but the locales still look fake and hardly as convincing as the ones in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), even though Welles and cinematographer Russell Metty (who shot Naked Alibi as well) didn’t shoot in Tijuana but staged the Mexican scenes at Venice Beach. But there are a lot of good things as well, including Metty’s marvelous all-out noir photography and the way Roman and director Hopper created the same kind of hero-heroine-villain love triangle Alfred Hitchcock used again and again and again (in The Lodger, Blackmail, Sabotage, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious and North by Northwest). Naked Alibi has a haunting quality that makes up for all it gets wrong, including the sheer shock when we see Gene Barry in the throes of an extra-relational affair with Gloria Grahame just after we’ve been led to believe that Barry’s character (a family man after all!) is a good guy being railroaded by a crooked cop. It’s an impression reinforced by Barry’s previous roles as a hero in films like The Atomic City and The War of the Worlds. Eddie Muller invidiously compared it to Touch of Evil, also a film set largely in Mexico and dealing with a corrupt cop out to get a seemingly innocent suspect who turns out to be guilty. He pointed out that Jerry Hopper directed 14 feature films in four years and that Tab Hunter had called him “a traffic cop” who wasn’t concerned with whether his films were any good or not as long as they came in on time and under budget. Muller wished that a better director (the ones he named were Don Siegel, Phil Karlson and Joseph H. Lewis) had got hold of this script, but as it stands, despite its weaknesses, Naked Alibi is a haunting film that works as noir and deserves to be better known.