Movie Magg

The Old Barn (Mack Sennett Productions/Educational Pictures, 1929)

2009-12-16T11:29:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran The Old Barn, a 1929 Mack Sennett short that was certainly one of his first sound films and may have been the first. I’d downloaded this off archive.org and used it to fill out the disc on which I’d burned the 1933 film Corruption, and it proved to be a mildly amusing but not especially inspired comedy, directed by Sennett himself from a script by the usual committee — Hampton Del Ruth, Alfred M. Loewenthal, Andrew Rice, Earle Rodney and “story supervisor” John A. Waldron. (It was Sennett who pioneered the system — still used for TV sitcoms today — of having the writers sit around a table and bounce potential gags off each other, eventually evolving a script between them by using each other’s laughter, or lack of same, to determine what an audience is likely to find funny.)

By this time Sennett was already on the downgrade, having lost his distribution contract with Paramount and signed with Educational Pictures (the studio formed by his one-time comedy producer rival, Al Christie, which did not in fact make educational pictures) — though within a few years he’d make a mini-comeback, regaining his berth at Paramount and launching Bing Crosby’s movie career and W. C. Fields’ talkie comeback (and also giving Paramount the inside track on signing Crosby and Fields for features). The Old Barn is an interesting little movie, surprisingly naturalistic for a 1929 talkie (as Charles noted, the actors actually spoke normally and without the long … pauses … between … words characteristic of a lot of early sound features) but also not especially funny. It starts out at a country hotel and ends up in (not surprisingly) an old barn, where the various characters are alternately trying to capture and trying to hide from an escaped convict. It’s an O.K. movie but the funniest gag has nothing to do with the plot; it’s the opening logo, in which Sennett parodied the MGM lion by having a dog emerge from an archway and bark to herald the film.

Love Affair (Columbia, 1932)

2009-12-16T11:24:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Our feature last night was Love Affair — not the 1939 classic directed by Leo McCarey and starring Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne in a picturesquely doomed romance, or its 1994 remake with Warren Beatty (as star and director), Annette Bening and (in her last role) Katharine Hepburn (of course the most famous version of the story is the intervening one from 1957, also directed by McCarey and starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, retitled An Affair to Remember), but a 1932 film from Columbia directed by Thornton Freeland (mostly known for his musicals, especially Flying Down to Rio) and starring Dorothy Mackaill and Humphrey Bogart.

Bogart had come out to Hollywood in 1930 with a contract at Fox, but they’d dumped him after a few undistinguished supporting roles (and one quite good performance in John Ford’s Up the River, Spencer Tracy’s first feature and Bogart’s second). Columbia picked him up and had him under contract for six months in late 1931, but this was the only film they gave him — even though it was his first lead in a movie — and he made two films as a free-lancer at Warners in early 1932, Big City Blues and Three on a Match, before going back to New York, pursuing a stage career and making only one movie in the next four years (the 1934 gangster film Midnight, shot in New York for Universal — Bogart’s only credit for that company).

Love Affair, based on a story by Ursula Parrott and adapted for the screen by generally talented writers, Dorothy Howell (continuity) and Jo Swerling (dialogue), was one of those legendary movies I wondered if I’d ever get a chance to see — but unlike some of the others on that list (like Mamoulian’s Applause, Lubitsch’s Monte Carlo and Whale’s Remember Last Night?), it was one that failed to live up to the anticipation. Carol Owen (Dorothy Mackaill) is a devil-may-care heiress who decides out of the blue that she wants to learn to fly, so she enrolls in a flying school run by Gilligan (Jack Kennedy — not the same one!) and insists on going up with the school’s youngest and hunkiest instructor, Jim Leonard (Humphrey Bogart). What she doesn’t realize is that Leonard is about to quit the flying school to form a start-up company to develop a revolutionary new airplane motor he’s invented. What she also doesn’t realize is that she’s broke; for the last year her bills, unbeknownst to her, have been paid by her stockbroker, Bruce Hardy (Hale Hamilton), in anticipation of her marrying him.

Meanwhile, Hardy is also keeping a mistress, Linda Lee (the marvelous Astrid Allwyn), who’s exploiting him for his money so her boyfriend, theatrical director Georgie Keeler (Bradley Page), can soak Hardy for enough to mount a show that will make them both stars. By a weird bit of authorial fiat, Linda Lee is also Jim Leonard’s sister — though neither Linda nor Jim knows about the other’s dealings with Bruce and Carol. Got all that? Predictably — especially given the title of the film — Jack and Carol fall for each other, and Carol takes him on a round of nightclubbing and teaches him to play golf so he can have a sense of fun and not be a workaholic all the time — while Gilligan breaks off his plans to invest in Jack’s company because he thinks Jack has become too wrapped up in his relationship with Carol to devote the attention he needs to perfecting and marketing his invention. Love Affair isn’t an especially interesting story, and it’s told with such a strangulation-poor budget that we don’t get the generally obligatory montage sequence showing Carol leading Jim around to nightclubs, golf courses, and whatever else she’s supposed to be doing with him that’s taking his attention away from his startup.

Columbia seems to have blown the budget on Jim’s glorious-looking Art Deco office — one wonders how a budding entrepreneur who’s supposed to be scrounging for investors can afford such high-class digs — and it all ends with Jim, disillusioned with his triple betrayal (not only is his girlfriend going to marry another guy for his money, but the other guy is cheating on her with Jim’s own sister, while the sister is just trying to extort money from him), abandoning the startup and asking for his old job back, Carol deciding to rent one of Gilligan’s planes and use it to commit suicide, and Jim finally realizing all this and making an heroic run down the runway, where he leaps onto the plane (the leap itself was clearly doubled but there are enough close shots of Bogart grabbing and holding onto the plane for dear life it was clear he was really clinging to a plane as it taxied down the airport location), saves Carol and gives her a big kiss in mid-air to signal their reconciliation. Love Affair isn’t much of a story, and it isn’t told with anywhere near the sense of style that would have been necessary for it to work (though it benefits by the general sexual honesty of the so-called “pre-Code” period; the relationships between the characters are depicted as what they are, even though the Code Adminstration tried and failed to get Columbia to tone down the hints of actual sex between Jim and Carol) — and Mackaill is her usual competent but uninspiring self (the more I’ve seen of her other movies, the more her excellent performance in Safe in Hell looks like a fluke, inspired by the superb direction of William A. Wellman).

As for Bogart, he looks almost unimaginably callow. Oddly, in Up the River two years before he’d had a role of real substance (an ex-con desperate to conceal that fact from his family) and had anticipated some of the world-weariness and soured (but ultimately regained) idealism of the great Bogart roles to follow a decade or so later — but in Love Affair he’s a plain old juvenile, playing a part any decent-looking young male actor could have played and offering nothing special, nothing that would have made Harry Cohn realize what a great box-office name he would be. (Cohn would get another crack at Bogart 15 years later in the film Dead Reckoning after Bogart, by then a Warners superstar, renegotiated his Warners contract to be non-exclusive; Cohn would then get four more Bogart films through signing a distribution deal with Bogart’s company, Santana, and a sixth, The Caine Mutiny, when producer Stanley Kramer signed him up for it.)

Frolics on Ice (Everything’s on Ice) (RKO, 1939)

2009-12-14T18:15:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Our “feature” was a really peculiar effort called Frolics on Ice, originally made by producer Sol Lesser at RKO in 1939 and called Everything’s on Ice and then reissued in this version by something called “Screencraft Pictures,” presumably a TV label, in the 1950’s. We downloaded this one from archive.org and it turned out to be an indigestible mixture of skating musical and situation comedy. The main function seemed to be to create a screen vehicle for prepubescent skater Irene Dare, who’s cast as “Irene Barton,” younger daughter of barber Joe Barton (Edgar Kennedy) and his wife Elsie (Mary Hart). Elsie’s brother, Felix Miller (Roscoe Karns), talks Joe out of a loan of $150 (out of the $2,000 Joe has saved up to buy the barbershop at which he works) to launch Irene’s career, so while Joe stays behind in Brooklyn Felix, Elsie, Irene and her older sister Jane (Lynne Roberts) all journey to Florida.

On the train they meet up with nondescript nebbish Leopold Eddington (Eric Linden, who was about a decade too old for his role — he’s the living proof of all those gags in the Gold Diggers movies about youngish-looking men persisting in the juvenile roles until they get lumbago), who we’re told — but the principals are not — is actually a millionaire, having been made so in his teens by the sudden death of his oil-tycoon father (were the writers, Adrian Landis and Sherman Lowe, thinking Howard Hughes here?). He falls in love with Jane — and she with him — at first sight, but Felix thinks Leopold is an impoverished jerk and tries to break him and Jane up. Instead he seeks to pair her off with Harrison Gregg (George Meeker), who’s posing as a millionaire but is in fact about to be thrown out of the hotel for not paying his bill. There were quite a few other movies of the period, including The Gay Deception and Hands Across the Table, that did far more with these tropes than Frolics/Everything’s on Ice did, and eventually it all turns out as we expect it to: Harrison is exposed as a four-flushing gold-digger (we could tell all along because he was blond and had a “roo” moustache), Jane insists on marrying Leopold and finds out only afterwards that he is genuinely rich, and Leopold ingratiates himself with the family by buying Joe (ya remember Joe?) the barbershop and underwriting Irene’s latest production number, introduced by a quartet of singing bears (actually, of course, actors in ill-fitting bear suits), in which she plays a newly hatched baby penguin brought into the world by an avian medico named “Dr. Quack” (I’m not making this up, you know!) — the latter decision makes one (this one, anyway) think his love for the heroine outweighs his brains or good taste.

Irene Dare was billed as six years old — she was actually eight (she was born February 14, 1931 in St. Paul, Minnesota) — and she certainly knew her way around a rink, though her routines seem a bit dated today simply because she doesn’t do the spectacular jumps we expect from top-level figure skaters now. She gets to skate in four big production numbers that don’t involve any other members of the cast — just a bunch of chorus skaters and a stereotypical screaming-queen director staging them — including an introduction set to the title song by Milton Drake & Fred Stryker; an Americana number in which she skates to “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” and other moth-eaten “patriotic” favorites; a Hawai’ian number in which she attempts a hula on skates (she can’t do it but it’s highly doubtful anyone could have); and that ghastly final major production, staged by Dave Gould (whose faux-Berkeley spectacles weighted down the early Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, and who’d done a far superior ice ballet in the 1933 musical Melody Cruise) to a song called “Birth of a Snowbird” by Victor Young and Paul Francis Webster (both of whom did much better work elsewhere). Dare’s ice numbers look like they were spliced in from another movie, and though she luckily escaped the fate of JonBenet Ramsey (according to imdb.com Dare is still alive!) there’s something of the sick exploitation of the young about her appearance here, especially when that obnoxious Uncle Felix (judging from this film and also the far superior Road to Happiness, Roscoe Karns’ whole stock in trade seems to have been obnoxiousness!) coaches her to say, as part of his attempt to pass off his family as rich to attract a rich husband for Jane, “I don’t have to skate for money. I skate because I like to.”

Irene Dare (true name: Irene Davidson) was first introduced to movie audiences the previous year in a film also produced by Sol Lesser, Breaking the Ice, with fellow child star Bobby Breen, and she made only one other movie (Silver Skates, for Monogram in 1943, starring Kenny Baker and adult skater Belita with Patricia Morison and the real-life comedy skating duo Frick and Frack), and in a few minutes on the Web I haven’t been able to find out what happened to her after that, but she’s a personable little kid who deserved a better vehicle than this bizarre retreat of old movie clichés (with workmanlike but hardly inspired direction by Erle C. Kenton) in which we’re always two to five reels ahead of the filmmakers in figuring out what’s going to happen next.

One Body Too Many (Pine-Thomas/Paramount, 1944)

2009-12-13T14:25:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was One Body Too Many, which I recently burned to DVD from an archive.org download, a 1944 horror spoof from Paramount that I probably would have liked better if I hadn’t watched it so soon after the 1941 Universal film The Black Cat, since the plot premises are the same (an eccentric millionaire puts off her — or, in this case, his — relatives by writing a really bizarre will that makes them wait for their inheritances, and during the wait they start knocking each other off) and Bela Lugosi not only appears in both movies but plays the same role: the crazy rich person’s long put-upon butler. Lugosi is billed third — though the public-domain DVD’s generally put him first — behind Jack “Tin Man” Haley and Jean Parker.

Haley plays Albert Tuttle, life-insurance salesman for the Emperor company (which, by the looks of things, appears to be just Tuttle and one other person who banters with him in the opening scene — one wonders why Paramount didn’t recycle the elaborate insurance-company office mockup Billy Wilder had built for Double Indemnity), who has finally made an appointment to sell a $200,000 life insurance policy to eccentric millionaire Cyrus J. Rutherford. Tuttle explains to his partner that Rutherford is a believer in astrology — so much so that he has had an observatory, complete with dome and enclosed telescope, built on the premises of his home, and he’s hired an astronomy professor to work for him full-time, watching the stars through the telescope and giving him information about their positions in the sky so he can forecast his own future — and that Tuttle himself has succeeded in landing an appointment with him where other insurance men have failed by playing along with Rutherford’s astrological bent and making the date for a day when Leo, Rutherford’s sign, is in the ascendant.

We then cut to Rutherford’s home and to a close-up of his coffin — we’re supposed to be savoring the irony that the guy croaked just before Tuttle was to meet him and sell him a policy, but we also feel a sigh of relief that Tuttle didn’t get there in time to sell the policy and then have his company have to pay out on it. Not that there was much chance of Tuttle buying a policy since Rutherford already had a large fortune and hated all his relatives; he has his attorney, Morton Gellman (Bernard Nedell), summon them all to his home and read them the “preamble” to his will. This stipulates that he must be buried in a coffin with a clear window (sort of like Lenin’s) which is to be placed where it has a clear view of the stars, so they will keep shining down on him even after he’s dead. It also says that his relatives — whom he insults viciously throughout the document, suggesting that after he dies he’s going to be reincarnated as Don Rickles — are to wait in the house until his star-oriented crypt is built, and if they leave they will disinherit themselves, while if his body is buried or disposed of in any other way than the one he stipulated, the terms of the will will be reversed and the people he willed the least to will get the most, while those he willed the most to will get the least. He also says that the terms of the will itself — which he hand-wrote and sealed so not even Gellman knows what’s in it — are not to be read until after he’s interred in the clear crypt and placed in full view of the stars.

What follows is a pretty pointless but still sporadically amusing bit of nonsense in which Tuttle comes off as quite personable and attracts the affections of the only decent person in Rutherford’s family, Carol Dunlap (Jean Parker), while Cyrus’s body is stolen from its coffin and a few other people on the premises — including Gellman — turn up dead. One Body Too Many is not much of a movie — the 1941 Black Cat did a better job on this premise — but at least Lugosi gets some droll moments of his own (notably in one scene in which it’s hinted that he’s dropped rat poison in his coffeepot so everyone who drinks his coffee will be killed — though at the end, after everyone else has refused his coffee for reasons ranging from the sensible, “It keeps me awake,” to the snobbish — Tuttle says he won’t have any because it was made with a percolator and “I’m a drip,” evincing a kind of coffee connoisseurship I didn’t think came into existence until at least the 1950’s — he and the maid drink some of it themselves, to no ill effect) and Haley gets to recycle some of the dialogue of his Wizard of Oz cast-mate Bert Lahr and overall project a warm, rather homey air even in the quirky role of an insurance salesman who’s mistaken for the private detective who was supposed to guard Cyrus’s body and make sure nobody tried to bury it contrary to Cyrus’s instructions.

In the end, the murderer is unveiled — he’s Henry Rutherford (Douglas Fowley), the only one in the family who had Cyrus’s last name (all the others, we’re obviously supposed to assume, descended from his female relatives) and who earned (so to speak) his uncle’s dislike when he married a slatternly and unscrupulous woman named Mona (Dorothy Granger) — and Tuttle rescues Carol from him in the nick of time. We don’t ever find out who gets what from the Cyrus Rutherford estate and we don’t really care; directed by Frank McDonald from an “original” screenplay by Winston Miller and future director Maxwell Shane, One Body Too Many is an engaging little farce that could have done more with the central premise than it did but still is a relatively painless way to spend 75 minutes — and for once an archive.org post of a movie is actually complete!

Twilight (Summit Entertainment, 2008)

2009-12-12T16:39:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie Charles and I ran last night was Twilight, the heavily hyped first film in the series of adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s young-adult vampire novels, all of which seem to be titled according to times of day between dusk and dawn. The film was released last year and was an instant hit, and the sequel, awkwardly called The Twilight Saga: New Moon, was released a couple of weeks ago and was an even bigger instant hit, setting box-office records for the opening weekend. I ordered it my last time at Columbia House and decided to watch it while the sequel was still in theatres and the smell of hype was still in the air. It’s the sort of movie that grows on you; thinking about it now I’m liking it better than I did when I was directly experiencing it, and I’m impressed with it as a workmanlike piece of entertainment even though, since I’m about 40 years older than its target audience, it’s a bit difficult for me to see why it became such a high-profile cult item and attracted the enormous audience it did.

As just about everybody who’s living in a less remote place than Timbuktu knows by now, Twilight is the story of a 17-year-old high-school girl, Isabella “Bella” Swan (Kristen Stewart), who starts out the movie in Arizona, where her mom lives with her stepfather, a minor-league baseball player who spends a lot of time on the road. With mom planning to spend that time on the road with him, Bella decides to move up to Forks, Washington, where her dad Charlie (Billy Burke) is the police chief. Since Forks is a town of only 3,000 people — though Charles joked that its high school looks large enough to hold that many students — being its police chief isn’t that tough a job, and any qualms about its remoteness and isolation soon drain away for Bella because, unlike in virtually every other story ever told about a new kid in high school, rather than being looked down on Bella is instantly popular.

She’s got boys of various colors — Asian nerd Eric (Justin Chon), Black guy Tyler (Gregory Tyree Boyce) and white kid Mike Newton (Michael Welch) — interested in her almost immediately, but she’s unimpressed by any of them. There’s a brief glimmer of interest between her and a Native American kid, Jacob Black (Tyler Lautner), but it dies when she learns he attends school on the local reservation rather than at the big high school, but the boy she eventually goes for is Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), who lives with a mysterious clan led by his foster father, Dr. Carlyle Cullen (Peter Facinelli), and Carlyle’s wife Esmé (Elizabeth Reaser). The various Cullens all seem to have paired off with each other — they can since they’re not biologically related — and they’re all pale-skinned. Though they can go out during daytime, they prefer cloudy weather (one reason they located themselves in the chronically foggy, rainy climate of Washington state) because sun makes their skin look like it’s covered with industrial diamonds.

As this movie takes its own sweet time telling us — but most of its audience knew in advance anyway, making the l-o-o-o-o-n-g exposition especially annoying (director Catherine Hardwicke and writer Melissa Rosenberg take 50 minutes of screen time to give us story premises the folks at Universal in the 1930’s and 1940’s would have tossed off in a couple of brief, to-the-point scenes) — the Cullens are actually vampires, though they’ve taken an oath not to consume human blood but to feed themselves only on animals. In one of the nice pieces of dry wit that abound in the script, Edward explains that would be like a normal human being living entirely on tofu — it’s nourishing but tasteless.

Generally, Twilight is at its best when it’s combining the two genres that gave it its special appeal to the teenage audiences who made first the books and then the movies such enormous hits: the teen coming-of-age comedy/drama and the vampire movie. Though Kristen Stewart played an alienated teen in an even better movie, Speak — in which her alienation came not from being the new girl in school and falling in love with a vampire but from having been raped by the B.M.O.C. and then turned into a pariah because she called the police to raid the party at which she met the guy but then ran away instead of staying to press charges —she’s damned good here, and so is her vis-à-vis — even though I thought Cam Gigandet (a boy named Cam?) as James, member of a trio of bad vampires who do drink human blood and commit two murders in the movie (one of them of Waylon, played by Ned Bellamy, an old friend of Bella’s father), was considerably sexier than Robert Pattinson. Charles noted that for a modern-day movie Twilight is unusually well constructed — the story has a beginning, a middle and an end, and though the end is open-ended enough to set up a sequel it’s also a satisfying resolution to this phase of the story, like the endings in Wagner’s and Tolkien’s Ring cycles and not like the maddening serial cliffhanger-style endings of the first two Matrices.

One rather amazing aspect of Twilight is that it’s probably the first vampire movie ever made that doesn’t qualify as a horror film; there’s a fair amount of action (including a spectacular fight scene at the end between the good and bad vampires — one of the conceits of the saga is that vampires have super-powers, able to leap great distances, climb trees, move far more rapidly than normal humans and bend dented cars back into shape; in one sequence Edward uses his super-strength to block Tyler’s SUV as it’s hurtling towards Bella, thereby saving her life) but the emotions the filmmakers are evoking are romance and thrills, not terror. While I personally found the Underworld movies (at least the first two) more convincing rescensions of the vampire mythos into the modern era, Twilight is quite a workmanlike and impressive movie — indeed, I found myself liking it better than the Swedish import, Let the Right One In, that had been promoted as the more intellectually respectable alternative to it (in the Swedish movie the leads were still pre-pubescent and it was the girl, not the boy, who was the vampire) but which seemed to me much colder and less emotionally involving than Twilight.

The film ends with Edward and Bella swearing eternal love for each other even though both of them are all too aware that the only way they can make it eternal is if Bella is herself “vampirized” — and Meyer, Rosenberg and Hardwicke make much of the Anne Ricean irony that she’s more eager for that to happen than he is: at times it seems like one of those stories in which a person who’s never considered himself Gay or herself Lesbian has his/her first sexual experience with a same-sex partner, falls in love immediately and then is warned by the veteran Queer they’ve just fallen in love with, “Not so fast. This kind of life is a lot harder than you think.” Though Twilight suffers from the length of its exposition — it improves dramatically at the 50-minute mark once Bella finally realizes her boyfriend is a vampire — and doesn’t entirely escape the risibility any supernaturally-driven story treads on the thin edge of, it’s a quite impressive piece of work, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the fact that the original story writer, the screenwriter and the director are all women helped shape the marvelous emotional sensitivity with which the story is told. Believe it or not, I’m actually looking forward to seeing the sequel some day!

Road to Happiness (Monogram, 1942)

2009-12-11T14:11:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Our first movie last night was Road to Happiness, an item I’d downloaded from archive.org (http://www.archive.org/details/road_to_happiness) and burned to a DVD, which was billed on their site as a 1934 musical starring John Boles as an aspiring singer who makes it as a radio star. Curiously, I found out from imdb.com that the movie was actually made in 1942 — which explains why Boles looked a decade older than he had in his early-1930’s films (he was a decade older!) — though one could readily see where the mistake came from because this movie, a production of second-iteration (post-1937) Monogram, actually seemed much closer philosophically and thematically to the early 1930’s than the early 1940’s. (The release date for Road to Happiness given on imdb.com was January 9, 1942, which means it was almost certainly finished before the U.S. entered World War II and probably seemed dated to audiences once it finally hit theatres.)

The plot has aspiring opera singer Jeff Carter (John Boles) scraping up the money to return from Lisbon, where he ended up after spending several years in Europe studying the baritone repertoire and gaining experience in small opera companies, to the U.S., where he hopes to parlay his European experience into major opera stardom. He’s saddled with obnoxious manager Charley Grady (Roscoe Karns),who seems better at alienating his potential employers than wooing them; and the man on whose approval his career depends is temperamental conductor Pietro Pacelli (Paul Porcasi, who seems to be enacting the popular image of Arturo Toscanini as a crazed maniac who insulted his musicians and treated everyone else like shit), but those are the least of his problems. His biggest problem is that he’s totally broke — so much so that he has to ask his former landlady Mrs. Price (Lillian Elliott) for his old room back — and his wife Millie (Mona Barrie) has divorced him (though she continued to write to him in Europe, giving him the false impression that once he returned to the U.S. they’d get back together) and remarried. Her new husband is a wealthy stockbroker, Sam Rankin (Selmer Jackson), and the two of them have sent Jeff’s son Danny (Billy Lee in a refreshingly un-sentimental performance for a child actor just after the Age of Temple) to military school, where he’s doing well and he’s well-liked. Daddy goes to the school to fetch him, and Danny is glad to see him and eagerly agrees to leave the school and move in with dad even though all dad has to offer him is a room in a boardinghouse (which he can’t even pay for — Mrs. Price is giving him credit, as she had done when he and his wife lived there years earlier) and whatever presents and treats he can get by pawning his belongings.

In bare outline, the plot of Road to Happiness sounds like rancidly sentimental treacle, but as actually played the film is surprisingly tough-minded and emotionally moving; writers Matt Taylor (story) and Robert Hardy Andrews (script) play against many of the usual clichés and avoid the easy movie devices many writers would have plugged into this story. What’s more, they give the tale a deep sense of class consciousness fairly common in the movies of the early 1930’s (at the height of the Great Depression) but surprising as late as 1942 (no wonder the folks at archive.org thought this movie was eight years older than it was!) and they make Millie a surprisingly bitchy character, totally heedless of the welfare and needs of her son and interested only in being a socialite and hanging out with worthless drinking buddies. The first weekend Jeff sends Danny back to see his mom, she turns him away with a note — given to him by her butler — that she’s too busy to see him.

The second weekend she lets him in — and her new husband plies him with presents and evinces far more caring and interest in his welfare than his mom does — but at 5:15 p.m., when he wants to listen to the “Laughing Cowboy” radio show because his dad is playing the star’s faithful Indian companion (unable to find a job as a singer he’s taken the first thing he was offered, and he’s nobly renounced his operatic ambitions to make sure he’s making some money to take care of his son), mom trundles in her cocktail-party companions and they drown out the radio. Danny is so humiliated he insists on walking all the way back to his dad’s boardinghouse — even turning down his stepfather’s offer of a ride — out of a believable mixture of trauma and hurt pride that’s one of the many elements that makes this movie ring true emotionally instead of seeming manipulated for the tear ducts. (Charles pointed out that she’s probably the nastiest mother figure in classic Hollywood who wasn’t an out-and-out crook like the even more irresponsible mother in the 1931 film Night Nurse.)

Director Phil Rosen, who at this time was making mostly Monogram’s usual garbage, handles this story with the delicacy and the dedication it needs and shows that the two great movies he made in the early 1930’s (The Phantom Broadcast for first-iteration Monogram in 1933 and Dangerous Corner for RKO a year later) weren’t flukes. Only towards the end of the movie, when the writers have to let things start breaking Jeff’s way at long last so he can achieve success and raise his son as a single parent without having to worry about that bitch mother of his hurting him anymore, do they fall back into cliché; the great (and egomaniacal) singer Almonti (Antonio Filauri) shows up for his weekly program at the same station where Jeff is rehearsing his latest “Laughing Cowboy” script, only he’s too drunk to perform, so Jeff goes on in his place, sings “Vision fugitive” from Massenet’s Hérodiade (an odd feature for a baritone — even in an era in which more people listened to and followed opera than do now, one might have expected him to sing a bit of Rigoletto, the Toreador Song from Carmen, or another more famous baritone aria), is an instant star and gets the offer from tempermental conductor Pacelli (ya remember Pacelli?) he’s been waiting for all along.

Until then, though, Road to Happiness has been quite an engaging film that’s well worth watching (even though the print on archive.org, along with being misdated, is about 10 minutes shorter than the original release, and some of the cuts — including one of Boles’ three songs, “America” — are all too obvious) and surprisingly moving emotionally even though it’s not really a musical — there’s no production number and all Boles gets to sing in this print is the Massenet aria at the end and “Danny Boy” (it seems almost certain that the writers named his son after this song, as an excuse to get it into the movie!) early on over the dinner table at the boardinghouse.

The Magic Carpet (Columbia, 1951)

2009-12-11T14:05:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The second film I ended up running last night was one I’d screened before and which had also turned out to be surprisingly good: not a classic by any means but an entertaining movie with a lot of charm. The film was The Magic Carpet, an Arabian Nights tale made by Columbia in 1951. It was a sleazy little project, produced by Sam Katzman and directed by Lew Landers, and the female lead — Narah, sister of the usurping Caliph Ali (Gregory Gaye), who in the opening sequence murdered the rightful Caliph Omar and his wife Yashima (Doretta Johnson), who was able to send her newborn baby to the safety of the home of her uncle, Dr. Ahkmid (William Fawcett), via the titular magic carpet — was offered to, of all people, Lucille Ball. This was Harry Cohn working at his Machiavellian best: Ball had just accepted a major role in Cecil B. DeMille’s circus extravaganza The Greatest Show on Earth but that was a Paramount production and she still owed Columbia one more film on the three-picture deal under which she’d made The Fuller Brush Girl and Miss Grant Takes Richmond.

Ball asked for a loanout and Cohn refused; then Cohn sent her the script of The Magic Carpet, thinking she’d turn it down and he’d be able to fire her without paying her the contract salary he owed her for a third film. On the advice of a friend, Ball accepted the script, thinking that since it was a “B” and her role was small (Patricia Medina actually has more screen time in the final film than Ball does, and it is Medina who ends up with the hero, played with his usual stiffness by John Agar) she could make it in a hurry and finish it quickly enough to keep her date with Cecil B. DeMille at Paramount. Only as she started making The Magic Carpet, Columbia’s wardrobe people kept having to let out her Arab princess’s costume again and again, and Ball finally realized that after 11 childless years she and husband Desi Arnaz were about to have their first baby, Lucie. (So Lucie Arnaz joins the ranks of future stars, including Liza Minnelli and Mia Farrow, who made their screen debuts — sort of — before they were born.) So she had to drop out of The Greatest Show on Earth (Gloria Grahame replaced her) and all she had left to show for her year’s work was a big paycheck from Harry Cohn and the promise of TV mega-stardom once I Love Lucy debuted that fall.

Given that background — and the presence of hacky micro-talents like director Lew Landers and male star John Agar — one would expect The Magic Carpet to be almost unwatchable trash. Surprise: it’s actually good fun, thanks mainly to its screenwriter, David Mathews, who manages on a far smaller budget and scale to achieve the balance all the mega-talents involved in the 1967 Casino Royale tried for and failed dismally at; his script follows the Arabian Nights conventions closely enough that the pre-pubescent boys in the 1951 movie audiences would have taken it as an exciting “straight” tale of derring-do, while the adults reluctantly accompanying their kids to the theatre would have enjoyed it as a campy spoof. Agar’s role, Ramoth a.k.a. “The Scarlet Falcon,” is of course the son of the martyred Omar and Yashima and the apprentice of his foster-father, Ahkmid; and he insinuates his way into the palace of the Caliph of Baghdad by slipping the Caliph (who by the way is drawn as yet another Iraqi precursor of Saddam Hussein, ruthlessly suppressing any hint of political dissent and taxing the population unmercifully to pay for his royal palaces — no wonder it was so easy for both Presidents Bush to demonize Saddam: he was playing the Hollywood script of a villainous Arab ruler!) a drug that gives him hiccups, then “curing” him by being the only one there with the antidote.

The elements are pretty predictable — Ramoth has a comic-relief sidekick, Razi (George Tobias); Razi’s daughter Lida (Patricia Medina, Mrs. Joseph Cotten), is a tomboy who wants to join the band of the “Scarlet Falcon” (in which guise Ramoth stages daring raids on the Caliph’s caravans and, like an Arab Robin Hood, distributes stolen grain to the starving people of Baghdad) and also is in love with Ramoth and has some jealous hissy-fits towards Narah; and bad Caliph Ali has a Karl Rove-like grand vizier, Boreg al Buzzar (Raymond Burr — interesting to find two 1950’s TV icons in this film! — who isn’t as good as the superb George Zucco in a similar role in Sudan but is certainly acceptable), whom Ramoth defeats in the climactic swordfight to regain his rightful throne but only after he uses the titular magic carpet to take Lida on a honeymoon ride while Ali and Narah are taken to Abu Ghraib (or whatever was serving that purpose in this particular part of Iraqi history). The carpet itself is quite convincing; Columbia’s special-effects people were able to get it to fly without any discernible flaws in the process work (like the black lines — caused by shrinkages in one of the films before a scene is double-printed — that generally marked attempts at this kind of shot at cheaper studios) — and so is Agar as the hero; he was never any great shakes as an actor and he can’t compare to Douglas Fairbanks or even Jon Hall, but he’s far better than the outrageously miscast Tony Curtis in the contemporaneous The Prince Who Was a Thief and his well-known friendship with John Wayne led him to imitate Wayne’s famous halting cadences whenever he wanted to sound butch — to surprisingly good effect.

Lucille Ball seems hardly to be in the film at all; she doesn’t get any comedy scenes, her manner is too modern to suit an Arab costume drama (though she does haughtiness and jealousy quite well) and her flaming-red Sydney Guilaroff hair seems odd in the court of Baghdad, though at least it makes her stand out in the sometimes murky Supercinecolor process in which this film was shot. (David Mathews actually offered to write more scenes for Ball and fatten her part, but Lucy — whose only motive for making this film was a quick paycheck, the quicker the better — turned him down and said she’d accept the part as it stood.) Though it tends to drag towards the end as the plot lurches towards its predictable resolution (I was rather hoping that since this was taking place in a Muslim country, Ramoth would be allowed to marry both female leads — but the Production Code would have rendered that unthinkable even to a writer with his tongue so firmly in his cheek as David Mathews), overall The Magic Carpet is a surprisingly fun, engaging minor film that pleasantly fills 83 minutes.

Christmas in Connecticut (Warner Bros., 1945)

2009-12-10T16:01:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film we watched last night was one Charles had requested: Christmas in Connecticut, which I knew I had on an old commercial VHS tape and it turned out I had on DVD, too — I had recorded it on December 24, 2008 from TCM right after the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol directed by Edwin L. Marin with Reginald Owen as Scrooge. Christmas in Connecticut is a modern-dress comedy, directed by Peter Godfrey from a script by Adele Commandini (writer of Deanna Durbin’s early vehicles, and it shows) and Lionel Houser from a story by Aileen Hamilton. According to imdb.com, it was based on a columnist in Family Circle magazine named Gladys Taber, who lived in Connecticut on a farm called Stillmeadow (as opposed to all those moving meadows we’ve seen lately?) and wrote a column on cooking and farm life and taking care of a family.

The conceit Hamilton, Commandini and Houser came up with was that their character, Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck), really lives in a ratty New York City apartment and can’t cook at all — this would-be Martha Stewart (the modern-day person people who watch Christmas in Connecticut today are instantly reminded of) is faking it all, getting her recipes from local restaurateur Felix Bassenak (S. Z. Sakall) and making the rest of it up. Meanwhile — in fact, this is how the movie opens — sailors Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan) and “Sinky” Sinkiewicz (Frank Jenks) are shipwrecked when their destroyer is torpedoed and they spend 18 days on a raft without food. (In an hilarious and inventive sequence, Jones dreams that he’s sitting at a table on the raft and being served a gourmet meal by Sinky in waiter’s drag.) Recuperating in a naval hospital, Jones gets upset that he’s being fed only milk while Sinky is getting full-course meals, and on Sinky’s advice he decides that the way to get decent food is to cruise the nurse who’s taking care of them, Mary Lee (Joyce Compton).

Only Mary is so resistant that in order to get to her he has to promise to marry her — and she decides that the problem with him is that he’s never had a family (he was an artist and a drifter before he enlisted) and therefore she’ll write a letter to Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet), publisher of the Smart Housekeeping magazine for which Elizabeth writes her column, and get her boyfriend invited to Elizabeth’s farm for the Christmas holiday. Since she already knows Yardley — she once took care of his granddaughter — the plan works, and now Elizabeth and her editor, Dudley Beecham (Robert Shayne), have to come up with a Connecticut farm, a husband, an eight-month-old baby (since Elizabeth has written in her columns that she has one) and some absolutely astonishing holiday meals to fool Jones and also Yardley, who will fire them instantly if he realizes they’ve been faking her columns. In a way the opening of this movie is a parody of Meet John Doe — another film in which Stanwyck played a journalist who faked a big story and then worried about the reaction of her corpulent, hard-hearted boss when he found out — though soon enough Dudley comes up with solutions to the various dilemmas involved.

The farm will come from John Sloan (Reginald Gardiner), foofy architect who’s been after Elizabeth to marry him for years — though he lets out a homoerotic yelp of delight when he finds out that his Christmas guest will be a sailor — the baby will be one of the local kids, whom Sloan’s maid Norah (Una O’Connor) babysits; and the dinners will come from Felix, who’ll be invited to tag along and pose as Elizabeth’s uncle. Complications ensue — including the rather delightful one that there are two babies, of different hair colors, facial appearances and, most importantly, genders — and Yardley himself also comes up for the weekend, while John and Dudley summon the local justice of the peace (Dick Elliott) to tie the knot between John and Elizabeth — only they’re always getting interrupted, and any hardened moviegoer will realize that’s because Elizabeth is destined to fall for that hot, hunky sailor and want to marry him at the end.

Christmas in Connecticut isn’t exactly on the level of It’s a Wonderful Life or the various Christmas Carols as a holiday institution, but on its own merits it’s a quite good movie — surprising from a usually lackluster director like Peter Godfrey. No, he’s not Preston Sturges or Howard Hawks (for whom Stanwyck made her two best comedies — The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire, respectively), and Christmas in Connecticut would have been an even better movie than it is if they’d let Sturges loose on it (though it would also have been considerably quirkier and possibly less of a box-office hit), but on its own merits it’s a quite charming film and noteworthy not only for Stanwyck’s comedic skills but Greenstreet’s as well.

On stage Greenstreet had been best known as a comedian — his signature role was Shakespeare’s Falstaff — but when he was recruited for his film debut (at age 61!) it was as the black-hearted criminal mastermind of The Maltese Falcon and that became his film “type.” Seeing him here is a real treat and makes the whole idea of Greenstreet as Falstaff seem much more credible than it does in his other movies. The movie is generally well acted — though Dennis Morgan is a bit hard to take as the irresistible man who’s got both sex appeal and war-hero status on his side in the romantic conflict (Sturges would probably have wanted Joel McCrea for the part, which would have been better) — and Godfrey actually moves the camera and dollies through the house to discover the characters (and give this an air of French-style bedroom farce at times) instead of just doing traditional shot-reverse shot edits.

The real hero(ine) of this film behind the camera, though, is probably Commandini — she gave Stanwyck’s character here the same nervy combination of indomitability and vulnerability she’d given to Deanna Durbin in her Universal vehicles a decade earlier, and though she had two collaborators the general aura of the story seems to be hers. Christmas in Connecticut was remade for cable TV in 1992 with Arnold Schwarzenegger directing (his only shot behind the cameras) and Dyan Cannon in the Stanwyck role, and according to imdb.com another version is slated for next year, but this one is quite good enough and a welcome holiday-themed audience diversion.

Racket Busters (Warner Bros., 1938)

2009-12-09T17:22:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I caught this morning was Racket Busters, a typical Warners programmer from 1938 written by two estimable scribes — Robert Rossen and Leonardo Bercovici — not that that helped much, and directed in his usual unsubtle slam-bang style by Lloyd Bacon. Humphrey Bogart is top-billed — though not above the title — as Martin (his first name is John but that’s not revealed until he’s arrested and tried at the end), a “racketeer” in the literal sense of the word: one who organizes phony “associations” — ostensibly unions or business groups, but actually shakedowns in which the members are forced to pay up or else have their livelihoods destroyed and sometimes get killed. Walter Abel plays Hugh Allison, the prestigious attorney who’s drafted as a special prosecutor to try to bust the rackets for good — he got a similar appointment previously but was unable to make his charges stick because the judges and juries were successfully intimidated — and who runs up against a wall of silence from the people whom the rackets are exploiting.

Among these are independent truck driver Denny Jordan (George Brent) and his pregnant wife Nora (Gloria Dickson, someone Warners clearly was trying to build into a star, but it didn’t take), along with his sidekick Skeets Wilson (Allen Jenkins) and Skeets’ girlfriend Gladys (Penny Singleton, pre-Blondie). It’s pretty much a standard by-the-numbers Warners gangster flick, with exciting chase scenes, elaborate montages to advance the story (including one in which Bogart’s face looms spectrally over the actions committed by his hired thugs, running rebellious truck drivers off the road and pouring gasoline over produce owned by commodity merchants who refuse to pay tribute to his gang) and a down-the-middle plot line that acknowledges the existence of honest labor unions while strongly suggesting that the Teamsters Union wasn’t an honest union later taken over by gangsters, but was a gangster-led enterprise from the get-go.

Racket Busters is unevenly acted — Bogart, in the nominal lead, does little more than snarl (he was clearly getting tired of these cookie-cutter gangster parts and this was around the time he joked that he could write all his lines on 3” x 5” cards because he said the same things in every movie and all that varied was the order in which he had to say them); Gloria Dickson tries hard but shows why she never became a major star; Allen Jenkins is his typical self until the end — when he tries to rouse his fellow truckers to break a gangster-called strike, gets picked off by a Martin assassin for his pains, and has a surprisingly moving and finely acted death scene reminiscent of Jimmy Durante’s in The Wet Parade. But the big problem with this movie is that the role of Denny Jordan cried out for James Cagney and got George Brent, who not only fails to convince us that he’s a proletarian but also is utterly incapable of tracing the character’s arc from heroic resister of Martin’s machine to Martin’s stooge and back to decent human being again.

The Snow Creature (Planet Productions/United Artists, 1954)

2009-12-09T17:18:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I screened The Snow Creature, a 1954 film from director/producer W. Lee Wilder (Billy Wilder’s cousin, though imdb.com mistakenly identifies him as the more famous Wilder’s brother — in fact “Wilhelm” was the original first name of both of them so they couldn’t have had the same parents) that actually had the potential to be an interesting and different film if the budget hadn’t approached strangulation level; one gets the impression Wilder and his son Myles, who wrote the script, were panhandling on Hollywood Boulevard for the money to keep shooting.

A couple of white guys, botanist Dr. Frank Parrish (Paul Langton) and Peter Wells (Leslie Denison), organize an expedition into the Himalayas for reasons Wilder Söhn never quite makes clear. But when their lead Sherpa guide, Subra (Teru Shimada), loses … well, at first it’s his sister-in-law but later it’s his wife — anyway, whoever she is and however they’re related, she’s kidnapped and carried off by a Yeti (an Abominable Snowman to you), a giant guy in a carpet sample who is part of a race of legendary beings living in the mountains, Subra and his fellow Sherpas stage a mutiny, take over the expedition and send it off in the mountains to hunt the Yeti.

After about 40 minutes’ worth of screen time walking around the mountain set (actually the familiar Bronson Canyon Western location, liberally strewn with ground-up cornflakes or whatever they were using then to simulate snow), they finally capture a Yeti — alive — and bring it back to San Francisco (where, through the magic of stock footage, they fly from Nepal via New York à la Spider Island), whereupon the film turns into a chintzy remake of King Kong without the Kong-Fay Wray love story (indeed, there are no principal female characters in the movie!). The Yeti escapes captivity, kills a few women on the streets and is ultimately hunted down and killed — and that’s the end of it.

The Snow Creature gets a few things right — like the appearance of the Yeti, whom they keep quite effectively in shadow to make him look more sinister and keep us focused on the monster itself and not the chintziness of his makeup; and the fact that, unlike a lot of more highly regarded directors who shot mountaineering scenes, Wilder managed to make it believable that these people were in a highly cold and unforgiving climate. (The fact that we were watching this movie on a cold night and there were bits of real-life drafts in our room helped the verisimilitude, too.) But there are a lot more things that go wrong, including the fact that whenever the Yeti appears, he does so in the exact same piece of footage: a shot of the actor in shadow walking straight towards the camera. (The imdb.com entry on The Snow Creature tentatively lists Lock Martin — the unusually tall stunt person who played Klaatu in the 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still — as the Yeti, but stresses that that’s unconfirmed.)

It also doesn’t help that the language of the Sherpas sounds an awful lot like Japanese — for a reason that isn’t revealed until the credit roll at the end: they were all played by Japanese actors and therefore they were speaking Japanese! I don’t know if Mystery Science Theatre 3000 ever gave The Snow Creature the “treatment” — it would have deserved it and they could probably have done quite a number on it, but at the same time, as dull and uninspiring a movie as it is, there’s a kind of likability about it that really makes you wish it were a better film.

Three Episodes of “Beulah” and Other 1950’s TV Shows and Earlier Cartoons

2009-12-07T12:51:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

About a week ago Charles and I watched a miscellany of 1950’s TV shows he’d downloaded, including two prize episodes of the early-1950’s sitcom Beulah. My understanding was that this was originally produced as a vehicle for Hattie McDaniel in the lead role of Beulah, the wise-mammy maid to Harry and Alice Henderson (played by early-1940’s Universal veterans David Bruce and Jane Frazee) — essentially a modern-dress version of her Academy Award-winning role from Gone With the Wind — but McDaniel died after the first season and Louise Beavers replaced her in the role. The series entry on imdb.com is more ambiguous and seems to be saying that McDaniel only shot two episodes of the series, not an entire season. Fortunately, one of the episodes Charles downloaded featured her: a marvelous show in which the Hendersons’ son Donnie (Stuffy Singer) is doing poorly in his grade-school dance class because he finds the music he’s expected to dance to — a tea-dance waltz record of amazing insipidity — totally uninspiring.

In a plot twist that eerily anticipates the rock ’n’ roll craze of the mid-1950’s, Beulah and her boyfriend Bill (played by an actor billed as Ernest Whitman who turned out to be Ernie “Bubbles” Whitman, Armed Forces Radio Service announcer during World War II, who in between jokes about his weight got to announce a lot of great performances by Billy Eckstine’s band and many of the other great Black acts of the mid-1940’s), who in this episode runs a garage — in the later show with Louise Beavers he seemed to be a colleague of Beulah’s on the Hendersons’ household staff — get together, put on a Black boogie-woogie record and show Donnie how to do jazz dance. Donnie becomes the sensation of the school’s dance recital and, of course, pisses off the teachers and other authority figures no end, while the kids find this “new” music liberating.

The other Beulah episode — which we watched earlier — featured Louise Beavers and also centered around Donnie (a typically obnoxious movie kid but still a more interesting character than his parents), who needed baby-carriage wheels for his soap-box racer and got them by having the local store owner sell him a baby carriage on credit and bill his mom — leading everyone to the misunderstanding that his mom was pregnant. This one wasn’t as sharply written as the other — its writers were old Hollywood hack Harry Clork and a colleague named James Hill, whereas the “Waltz” episode was written by Ian McClellan Hunter (who became legendary not for any of his own scripts but from “fronting” for Dalton Trumbo on the film Roman Holiday — just before the release of the movie Hunter was blacklisted himself and was told that Paramount was taking his name off the movie; he complained to Trumbo and Trumbo got indignant and said, “They can’t do this to you!” Hunter replied, “But, Dalton, you wrote that script!” Trumbo was doing so much under-the-table work with so many “fronts” he himself had lost track of what he had and hadn’t written).

Though imdb.com lists Jean Yarbrough as the director of Beulah, both these episodes were directed by Richard Bare (also a “B”-movie director keeping alive by working for television, though at least Bare had got to make his “B”’s for a major studio, Warners). The show started with Beulah (whichever actress played her) speaking right to the camera and bemoaning the fact that Bill kept putting off their marriage, and it also had a third regular Black character: Oriole (played by Dorothy Dandridge’s sister Ruby in a chirpy-voiced manner reminiscent of Butterfly McQueen, who played a similar role opposite McDaniel in Gone With the Wind), a maid at one of the neighbors’ homes whom Beulah used as a friend and confidante.

According to Archive.org, only seven episodes of Beulah now exist even though the show ran for three seasons, and they have only three on their site, but even on the basis of these two shows it’s a quite remarkable sitcom and holds up well — and it’s interesting, noting Black bandleader Andy Kirk’s bitter remark that “civil rights worked in reverse in the music business” (he meant that Southern venue owners had been willing to hire Black bands when they could still segregate the audience, but once they had to integrate the audience they went with white bands exclusively), that according to the evidence of Beulah civil rights worked in reverse on TV as well: when they recycled this concept in the 1960's as Hazel, they picked a white actress, Shirley Booth, to play the all-knowing maid.

Certainly the two Beulah shows were a lot better than the third sitcom item Charles put on this disc: an episode of an early-1950’s sitcom variously known as The Stu Erwin Show and Trouble with Father, in which the whiny-voiced comedian from all too many 1930’s movies got to play a school principal and his real-life wife June Collyer played his on-screen wife — though the show wasn’t really I Love Lucy except in reverse: she was the level-headed one and he was the scatterbrain who came up with various mad schemes — in this show, running his own chicken farm on his premises so he doesn’t have to buy eggs. It was a perfectly decent but pretty uninspired show — and let’s face it, as a real-life married couple playing husband and wife on a sitcom they were a far cry below either Lucy and Desi or George and Gracie.

Charles’ disc also included a couple of other items, one of which was a half-hour show called Joe Santa Claus in which the central character is Joe Peters (Ray Montgomery), who’s appointed to play Santa Claus at the department store where he works because he’s considered the most expendable — he’s had a series of jobs he’s walked out on, and he doesn’t seem to be long for this one either. In a series of flashbacks it’s revealed that he served in World War II and brought home a German war bride, Maria (Maria Palmer), fathered a daughter by her and attempted to maintain a family, but his scattered work history, exaggerated sense of his own importance and general failure to Play Well With Others led to a separation, and at the moment he’s drafted to play Santa he doesn’t know the whereabouts of his wife and daughter. Needless to say, daughter herself shows up at the store to see Santa Claus and, with neither knowing who the other is, she pours out her heart to the department-store Santa and says all she wants for Christmas is her daddy back. This could have been insufferably treacly but for the writer and director, Alex Gruenberg (adapting a story by Howard J. Green), who not only plays down the obvious opportunities for cheap sentimentality but even gets a refreshingly hard-nosed performance out of the actress who plays the girl, Jeri James — she’s more bitter than sad over her dad’s disappearance and she pleads for his return with a grim determination that probably softens Joe’s heart far more than a more openly emotional tear-jerking one would have. It certainly moved me more than a more sentimental presentation of this material would have!

Also on the disc was an intriguing excerpt from the famous 1957 TV special that introduced the Edsel — it would be interesting to see the whole thing if it survives “complete” — featuring Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong in a sort-of duet on the song “The Birth of the Blues.” It’s mainly Sinatra singing it to the George Siravo arrangement he’d recorded it with five years earlier and Armstrong doing his level best to squeeze himself into it somehow — and it doesn’t help that Armstrong cracks on a few trumpet notes (his intonation was usually astonishingly close to perfect) or that the balance is pretty wretched, favoring Frank Sinatra’s singing over Armstrong’s contributions (it figures) and Armstrong’s trumpet playing over his singing. Given the beauty of Armstrong’s duets with Bing Crosby (they seem to have played well together because they’d both come up in the 1920’s and they’d known each other since 1931, when Crosby frequently played hooky from his own engagement at the Coconut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. to see Armstrong perform at Sebastian's New Cotton Club — an establishment that got put out of business when the gangsters who owned the original Cotton Club in New York sued Frank Sebastian for plagiarizing the name!) it’s rather disappointing that he and Sinatra didn’t do better together — they both seemed nervous, as if all too aware that this was a Big Event and it was going out live to a presumably enormous audience (though the post-show ratings were as disappointing as the sales of the Edsel itself), and they were both so scared of making a mistake that they couldn’t relax and show off their talents at their best. Still, this clip is well worth having, especially since Armstrong and Sinatra did almost nothing together — even when they were all in the film High Society it was Crosby, not Sinatra, who partnered Armstrong in the duets!

••••••••••

One of the items we watched last night was a third episode of Beulah that I’d spotted on archive.org, “Beulah Goes Gardening,” from the Hattie McDaniel season, in which the Hendersons, Beulah’s employers, decide to economize by firing their gardener. Supposedly dad Harry (David Bruce) is going to mow the lawn, mom Alice (Jane Frazee) is going to trim the rose bush (a particularly prized possession of Harry’s) and son Donnie (Stuffy Singer) is going to pull the weeds — but on the first Saturday when they have to do all this, they go out on various (separate) outings and each one in turn sticks Beulah with their job. There’s also a subplot in which Beulah takes the rose bush to a plant store to have it resuscitated — and the owner sells it instead, leading Beulah to take a couple of “loaner” rose bushes that are successively larger than the old one, which earns her an inaccurate reputation as a green thumb. While hardly in the same league as “The Waltz” episode, this is still an incredibly warm, funny show highlighted by the marvelous acting of McDaniel, who as she did throughout her career turned the “Mammy” stereotype into Earth Mother, all-seeing, all-knowing and telling us through a loving wink at the camera that she knows she’s really in charge, even though she’s nominally the maid, and without her all these white people would hardly be able to find the floor with thelr legs when they got out of bed in the morning. (Like the other two Beulah episodes on archive.org, this one was directed by Richard Bare — and the script is by Nathaniel Curtis, a reasonable enough author but hardly in the same league as Ian McClellan Hunter.)

I also paired this with a cartoon from Universal from about 1940 to 1940 called Scrub Me, Mama, with a Boogie Beat — essentially a cartoon video for the song of that title, which was recorded both by Will Bradley’s band and the Andrews Sisters. I thought it would be an interesting companion piece for Beulah since it was criticized on the archive.org Web site for its demeaning depictions of Black people — but while that’s there (the opening scene is of a stereotypically shiftless, lazy Black guy with a prominent nose getting stung in it by a bee, and him barely waking up long enough to say “ouch” and then going back to sleep), so is a dazzling use of color (by the time this was made Walt Disney’s three-year monopoly of three-strip Technicolor for animation was long over) and a fast, energetic presentation quite suited to the exuberance of the song by Don Raye. (I’d thought he wrote this one with his frequent collaborator, Gene DePaul, but no-o-o-o-o: this one is credited to Raye solo.) This cartoon, produced by Woody Woodpecker creator Walter Lantz, is also noteworthy for a dazzling color palette, mostly greens and reds, and for one of the rare times the “New Universal” (1937-1946) studio logo was shown in color (the sky was dark green — not deep blue or black, as I’d have expected — and the Universal letters were a kind of blue-white, while the stars in the sky were orange. Nice going!

••••••••••

In my researches into songwriter Arthur Johnston on archive.org I had run across a 1939 Popeye cartoon called It’s the Natural Thing to Do, a typical cross-promotion from Paramount (the song was written by Johnston and Sam Coslow for Bing Crosby’s 1937 film Double or Nothing) with a fascinating and surprisingly modern-sounding premise: Popeye and Bluto receive a fan letter saying that the author likes their movies but wants an end to the roughhouse stuff between them; instead they should treat each other with decency and decorum because “it’s the natural thing to do.” They reach a level of exquisite boredom with each other Dorothy Parker joked about when she reviewed Emily Post’s Etiquette — until Popeye and Bluto start crashing into each other as homoerotically as the Fleischer brothers and their animators dared, and soon they’ve abandoned all pretense of etiquette and “the natural thing to do” as they go at each other hammer-and-tongs. It’s a clever movie and has its share of physically impossible gags — including Popeye flying through the air from one of Bluto’s punches, landing inside a portrait of a woman and then her face dissolves into his — that made 1930’s cartoons watchable and readily distinguishable from the live-action silent comedies that had preceded them.

After that I screened the other “filler” on my disc, an episode of the rather interesting 1950’s British TV show The Invisible Man (ostensibly based on the character created by H. G. Wells but really a hero rather than a villain — his street name was Peter Brady and, like the modern-day superheroes but not the ones in the classic canon, he’s known to almost everybody else in the dramatis personae — the moment he shows up at an airport in the telltale bandages around his neck, everyone knows who he is) called “The Mink Coat,” featuring a relatively prestigious guest star, Hazel Court, as a ventriloquist puppeteer who’s en route to Paris to perform in a French nightclub when she’s waylaid at the airport by a man who’s part of a two-person team who sneaked into a secret installation, photographed some important plans (they’re shown as blueprints and I joked he had actually taken pictures of the plant head’s plans to remodel his house rather than getting the nuclear secrets he was clearly after) and put them into a small canister, only to avoid a security screening he sneaked up behind this woman, cut open the liner of her mink coat and put the microfilm inside.

Once all the principals — including Brady and his girlfriend — were in Paris, the man made some incredibly clumsy passes at the woman to try to get close enough to her to recover her microfilm — she puts him off the first time (it’s obvious she doesn’t realize he’s a spy; he just thinks he’s harassing her to try to get in her pants) and her husband (the spy didn’t realize she had one), a juggler on the same bill as her, blocks the second. It’s a nice, fast little vest-pocket adventure — it had to be because it was shot for a half-hour time slot (it times out as a little over 26 minutes to make room for commercials — gradually a half-hour commercial TV show shrank to 24 minutes and now the standard is 22!) and the hero has to get the villains quickly; the coolest moment in the show is towards the end, when the Invisible Man grabs the precious microfilm from one of the villains (the husband found it in the wife’s mink coat and, curious about what it was, took it to a film director friend of theirs and had it developed) and sets it afire, thereby preserving whatever the atomic secrets were — and it’s a delight (the sort of delight one watches invisible-man movies for) to see it go up in flames in mid-air.

While not a patch on the movies Universal made in the 1930’s and 1940’s on this premise, the Invisible Man TV show (one of my most curious memories from my childhood is of Peter Brady driving a convertible down a freeway — and he’s dressed but his head is invisible) is well done and reasonably engaging — it holds up pretty well, and to see an actress with the reputation of Hazel Court as guest star was a special treat.

The Monster Walks (Action/Mayfair/International/Commonwealth, 1932)

2009-12-05T17:07:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Monster Walks was a 1932 independent film — essentially a murder mystery disguised as a horror movie — whose entry in the American Film Institute Catalog lists it as a Ralph M. Like production for Action Pictures, Inc. (quite a misnomer given how little action there actually is in this film!) but which Carlos Clarens’ history of horror films identified as a Mayfair production (according to the AFI that was because Action Pictures went bankrupt while the film was in release — it was the middle of the Depression, after all — and Mayfair bought the rights), the AFI’s vaunted “modern sources” say Ralph M. Like owned a studio called International Film Corporation, and the print we were watching, a download from archive.org, had a credit on the title card to “Commonwealth Pictures.”

The Monster Walks was made the same year as The Old Dark House, and the two stand together as examples of what to do (The Old Dark House) and not to do (The Monster Walks) with the old-dark-house genre. There aren’t really any stars in this movie — the male lead is Rex Lease, a “B”-lister during the silent era (mostly in Westerns) who was already on his way down in 1932 without ever having been that high up in the first place. The story and script are by Robert Ellis and the director is Frank Strayer, who made some quite atmospheric little horror films for better indie studios — The Vampire Bat in 1933 for Majestic and the very impressive Condemned to Live in 1935 for Chesterfield — before signing with Columbia and wasting his flair for horror by taking the reins of the long-running Blondie series based on the comic strip.

The film centers around the Earlton brothers, one of whom has just died when the film begins while the other one, Robert Earlton (Sheldon Lewis, who played in the 1920 Louis B. Mayer version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — a film overshadowed then and now by the bigger-budgeted Paramount production of the same story the same year with John Barrymore, but one which has its points), is wheelchair-bound. The dead Earlton brother’s estranged daughter Ruth (Vera Reynolds) comes to the Earlton mansion to collect her inheritance — much to the bitterness of her uncle Robert, who believes she means to take over the entire estate and throw him out of it. Since he’s also the next in line for the estate if she should die before him, he’s got an obvious motive for her murder. As if that weren’t enough of a plot, it also turns out that the late Earlton was a research scientist who kept an ape in a cage in his basement and was planning to use it for an experiment in a human-to-ape brain transplant (not that old gimmick, again!).

Earlton’s will left a pension to the elderly housekeeper, Mrs. Krug (Martha Mattox), and her son and assistant Hanns (Mischa Auer — I was going to say “cast against type” but he played so many of these sinister, skulking hangers-on in the early 1930’s that it was actually his later comic roles, for which he’s best known now, that were against his early “type”). Also in the cast is Willie Best, the Black comedian who was still being billed as “Sleep ’n Eat” — he later rebelled and insisted studios credit him under his real name, but he still had to play the stupid shuffling servant stereotype — and he actually gets a few funny moments in this one (notably in which his foot gets caught in the jaw of a bearskin rug and he thinks he’s being attacked by the ape on the premises) but mostly it’s the same racist dreck he always played.

Indeed the biggest problem with The Monster Walks is that almost nothing actually happens — it’s mostly just people skulking around an old-dark-house set and acting mildly afraid of each other. There are a few red herrings — like the hairy, apelike arm that emerges in Ruth’s room one night and tries to strangle her, leading us to wonder if Robert Ellis is going to tell us that the supposedly “dead” Earlton brother is still alive but did one of his human-to-ape transplants on himself and became a were-ape — and a few good points, like the filmmakers’ resistance to using the gimmick of having Robert Earlton only fake his disability.

In the end, if you cared, Hanns Krug was the attempted strangler of Ruth, he tried again later but ended up killing his mom because she and Ruth had switched rooms, then killed Robert because he blamed Robert for having made him kill his mom, and finally trapped Ruth in the basement with the ape (a chimpanzee — a real one — instead of the usual gorilla-suited human who generally got cast in these roles), tried to get it to kill her, but the ape decided to play deus ex machina and kill Hanns instead. The closing gag contains a reference to Darwin and yet another racist gag for Willie Best, who’s told that he’s descended from apes and says he knew creatures like that in his family, “but they was less active.” The Monster Walks was just another Poverty Row quickie, clearly sucking off whatever star blood was left in Rex Lease’s bone marrow, and though it was only an hour long it still managed to bore.

Peggy Lee, June Christy & All-Women Bands (Idem, c. 1950)

2009-12-05T15:31:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I’ve been wanting to do a comment on the two movies Charles and I watched Wednesday night. One was a fascinating release from a European company called Idem (I think they’re the ones who were responsible for a fascinating, if not always especially well documented, series of live jazz LP’s released in Italy in the 1970’s, usually with more than one artist featured on each LP) billed as by Peggy Lee and actually combining six “Snader Telescriptions” by Lee and her husband Dave Barbour’s quartet; four “Snader Telescriptions” by June Christy and a band led by jazz accordionist Ernie Felice (for some reason misspelled “Filice” on Snader’s opening credits) and some older but still quite fascinating footage (mostly from band shorts, though at least one clip is from a feature film called Accent on Girls) of all-women bands: six by Ina Ray Hutton, one by Lorraine Page and four by Rita Rio. The Snader films are billed here as “soundies” — three-minute music videos made to be played on a “panoram,” a video jukebox briefly popular in the 1940’s (Orson Welles biographer Frank Brady calls them “somewhat of an unenthusiastic fad during the war years,” but they preserve quite a few great musicians and bands that otherwise we’d have no visual record of), but I suspect from the relatively late copyright date (1950) and the title “telescriptions” that they were meant as video equivalents of radio transcription discs, playable either in sequence to make up a TV program or one song at a time to fill in gaps in the broadcast schedule.

Many of the Lee songs are pieces she recorded commercially for Capitol in the late 1940’s — including her hits “Why Don’t You Do Right?” and “I Don’t Know Enough about You” — but her performances are clearly looser here, and are yet another testament to the superb quality of the musical team of Mr. and Mrs. Barbour — they almost literally make love in sound the way Billie Holiday and Lester Young did. What’s more, the Snader people weren’t just staging these as film clips; some of the songs are done in sets and costumes that suggest a story, much in the manner of later music videos — and at least one of these productions, “I Cover the Waterfront,” tries too hard: Lee is a wharf rat and Barbour the sailor she’s waiting for in what’s depicted as a pretty loveless coupling. Neither Lee’s voice nor her acting are world-weary enough to suggest the concept the director had in mind — Billie Holiday would have been ideal on both counts — but at least it’s a nice try, and the other “staged” videos, particularly “I Only Have Eyes for You” (set atmospherically outdoors against a night sky in New York — even though it was clearly filmed inside a studio and the buildings in the background are models — it’s not as dementedly imaginative as Busby Berkeley’s staging of the same song in the 1934 Warners musical Dames, but within the budget available to Snader’s director it’s a quite marvelous and atmospheric clip that supports the song), are far superior.

The Christy tracks aren’t as interesting, less because of her — she’s in good voice and the songs (“He’s Funny That Way,” “Taking a Chance on Love,” “Imagination” — though no one who’s sung this since has recaptured the beautifully prayerful quality of Frank Sinatra’s original record with Tommy Dorsey — and “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm”) are suitable for her, but the stagings are straight performance clips and an accordion-led small ensemble just doesn’t give her the “oomph” she got from the Stan Kenton band and the small groups drawn from it with which she was making most of her records at the time. Also she’s cursed with one of the most unflattering hairdos ever inflicted on a basically attractive woman by a moviemaker.

The all-women band clips are in some ways even more fascinating than the ones with Lee and Christy. Charles pointed out that as leaders of all-women bands, Ina Ray Hutton and Rita Rio had their pick of a relatively small talent pool — there weren’t many women instrumentalists but there weren’t many opportunities for them either; Woody Herman briefly had a woman trumpeter in the early 1940’s but most of the instrumental ranks of the big bands remained all-male. In the six clips presented here, Ina Ray Hutton reminded me a great deal of Ginger Rogers: tall, leggy, blonde, a fantastic dancer and a quite serviceable singer (indeed, one could readily imagine her holding her own in a film with Fred Astaire!), and Rita Rio seemed to have copied a good deal of Hutton’s act. Though Rio was dark-haired (as befit her Latina-sounding name) she also sang, also danced, and also conducted her orchestra with a very long baton that arced and curved like a whip when she waved it.

What came through from the clips is that Hutton and Rio seemed to have quite different priorities in terms of hiring musicians and running their bands: Hutton, like Jimmie Lunceford, went for a precise instrumental ensemble and gave her bandswomen few chances to solo (only two of the six songs here include improvised-sounding solos); Rio, like Duke Ellington and Count Basie, seemed more interested in picking inspired solo voices and giving them a chance to show off. Rio also sings a vocal duet, “I Look at You,” with — of all people — Alan Ladd; anyone who’d seen the Paramount film Variety Girl, in which he sings a lovely song called “Tallahassee,” wouldn’t be surprised that he had a voice, but here he’s quite a bit better than some more highly promoted crooners and one wishes that at some point Paramount had cast Ladd in a musical. (Well, if Dick Powell could move from musicals to films noir, why couldn’t Ladd have done the reverse?)

Port of New York (Aubrey Schenck Productions, 1949)

2009-12-05T15:27:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After watching the Idem video Charles and I put on Port of New York, a 1949 film gris from Aubrey Schenck Productions noteworthy as one of the first films to depict the work of agents from what was then the Bureau of Narcotics attempting to halt the smuggling of illegal drugs into the country — or, failing that, to find drugs that had already been smuggled and confiscate them and arrest the criminals before they could market the drugs and do social damage. It’s a blending of film noir and pseudo-documentary naturalism — though a lot of other movies, including Boomerang, Kiss of Death, Call Northside 777 and T-Men, were doing this blend considerably better at the time.

It benefits from actually having been shot in New York and from some decent noir atmospherics by cinematographer George Diskant (the go-to guy for New York-based productions at the time), but it isn’t helped by an even more stentorian and overwrought narration than usual in the genre, surprisingly flat and dull direction by Laslo Benedek (who later made The Wild One after the originally set director, Joseph Losey, was blacklisted) and a pretty weak pair of male leads, Scott Brady and Richard Rober. What saves this one are some pretty marvelous supporting players — even though only one of them went on to major stardom. That was Yul Brynner, billed fourth (this was his first film and he didn’t make another for six years, until The King and I), who plays the head of the drug ring — at least the highest-ranking member we actually see; there are the usual veiled (or not-so-veiled) allusions to the “Big One” that gives him his marching orders and who’s the one the agents would really like to bust, but we never actually see him and he certainly isn’t apprehended by the end of the film.

Brynner still had hair then, though his hairline was clearly receding and he was having his male-pattern baldness way early — reason enough that after shaving his head to play King Mongkut in The King and I, first on the Broadway stage and then in the film, he decided to keep doing it and make baldness a trademark. What’s more, this early he was also an incredibly charismatic actor who dominates every scene of the film that he’s in — and he’s especially chilling in the withering coldness with which he disposes of people who are no longer convenient to him, including his combination girlfriend and mule (K. T. Stevens, in a pretty cool performance of her own that ought to have marked her for biggers and betters, but didn’t) once he realizes she’s about to turn state’s evidence on him and meet with the narcotics agents. The other especially remarkable performance in this movie comes from Arthur Blake as a homely, heavy-set nightclub comedian with a rather mincing air about him — he’s shown doing an impression of Charles Laughton in Mutiny on the Bounty (pretty damned well, too) — who’s part of the ring and also an addict himself who gets caught when he diverts some of the recently imported shipment to his own use. Blake is a remarkable actor who creates real pathos out of a character written as just an unimportant subsidiary bad guy.

But aside from these nice performances from the supporting cast, Port of New York is just another movie, one which doesn’t really look all that noir (except in a few scenes showing Diskant’s gift for mood lighting even in a naturalistic outdoor environment) and ends with one of the agents getting killed and the other impersonating a crook to get in with the drug ring, only the Blake character’s girlfriend “outs” him and it ends with a shootout in which the good guys get the drugs and the bad guys end up arrested or dead. It’s really just another movie except for Brynner, Stevens and Blake — but they’re enough to make it worth watching.

Corruption (William Berke Productions/Imperial, 1933)

2009-12-05T03:07:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Our first feature of the night was Corruption, a 1933 film that was the sort of frustrating bad movie because one senses a good movie in it struggling to get out — and because its themes, involving politics, graft and sex, seem all too timely today even though the film’s style and technique are both horrendously dated. Produced by William Berke Productions for a distributing company called Imperial — Berke had a fascinating career path, from independent filmmaker in the 1930’s to RKO house director in the 1940’s (as which he did a lot of the later films in the Falcon series) and then back to the indies in the 1950’s (where he did the first two films based on Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels before he died in 1958) — Corruption was a wild story about political graft and, well, corruption, written and directed by C. Edward Roberts. Gorman (Tully Marshall), boss of an unnamed city’s Tammany Hall-like political machine, looked for a new mayoral candidate to defeat a genuine reformer and found him in Tim Butler (Preston Foster), an attorney who got a lot of good press for defending a personal-injury victim against a major corporation.

Like the political boss played by Edward Arnold in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — a film whose central plot device Corruption anticipates by six years — Gorman thinks he’ll be able to control Butler’s idealistic tendencies by exploiting his naïveté and keeping good, corrupt party hacks around him — particularly Regan (Warner Richmond), Gorman’s principal lieutenant in running the machine — but Butler turns the tables on him and within a year he’s cleaned up much of the graft that is making Gorman’s machine its money and has his sights set on nailing Regan. Then the Gorman machine strikes back and sets up Butler in a phony sex scandal — he’s caught by two reporters he’s befriended, Charlie Jasper (Charles Delaney) and his photographer, who supply the film’s supposedly “necessary” comic relief (this seems to have been a bizarre delusion that gripped most of Hollywood in the 1930’s and well into the 1940’s: the idea that serious, intense dramas and horror films needed so-called “comic relief” characters who usually weren’t even genuinely funny and just reduced the tension level of otherwise good films), who feel guilty about having been led to expose him but do so just the same — and Butler is removed from office and is forced to re-establish his law practice.

He’s also jilted by Gorman’s daughter Sylvia (Natalie Moorhead) — much to the undisguised joy of his secretary, Ellen Manning (Evalyn Knapp, top-billed), who’s in unrequited love with him and who has followed him down and is still working for him even though he can’t afford to pay her. (She donates $250 she’s saved up herself to keep his office going, falsely telling him it’s a contribution from his friend Dr. Robbins — played by Sidney Bracey in a refreshing change from his usual typecasting as butlers and valets.) Butler’s friends in law enforcement manage to extract a confession from the woman he was supposedly having the affair with and her confederate, and he’s about to be exonerated and appointed state’s attorney by the governor (a long-time political enemy of Gorman’s who’s anxious to shut down his machine) when he’s set up in another scandal; Regan and a henchman confront Butler in the lobby of his office building, Regan pulls a gun on Butler, who grabs for it and wrests it away, but just then somebody else — armed with a pistol which has a long barrel extension that appears to be a silencer — shoots Regan and Butler is arrested for the murder.

The case gets mysterious when Dr. Robbins, acting as medical examiner for the coroner, announces that even though there was no exit wound he was unable to find a bullet inside Regan’s body. Butler is convicted of the murder — the trial is blatantly rigged against him by a judge who’s obviously in the pay of the machine — and is sentenced to life imprisonment, but other members of Gorman’s gang are killed the same way even while Butler is serving his sentence, and eventually the killer turns out to be Voikov (Mischa Auer), a friend and former associate of Butler’s who during Butler’s term as mayor had frequently told him that it wasn’t enough to arrest the members of Gorman’s machine: the only way to get rid of them was to kill them permanently. To do this, Voikov, a research scientist, invented a bullet made of a liquid that turned super-hard when frozen and could be shot out of a gun and remain solid long enough to kill the person it was shot at, then melt inside their body and leave no trace. (Charles pointed out that the only way to fire such a bullet would be with a gun that worked by compressed air, since a normal gunpowder explosion would create such intense heat it would instantly melt the bullet — but given that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had written a compressed-air gun into “The Adventure of the Empty House” over three decades earlier, it’s not impossible that C. Edward Roberts borrowed the idea from him — or from Chester Gould, who had used the ice-bullet gimmick in an early Dick Tracy series in 1931, the year the comic debuted and two years before this film was made.)

Corruption is a frustrating film because its story premise is inherently exciting, but the film itself is surprisingly dull; probably because he was hamstrung by the substandard budgets and equipment independent producers had to work with, Roberts’ direction is dull, static, with almost no camera moves and absolutely no music except for an inappropriately bouncy main theme over both opening and closing credits. In other words, Corruption looks much more like a film from 1929 than one from 1933, and while Roberts turns out to be a talented director in at least one respect — he gets far more animated and intense performances from both Knapp and Foster than they usually gave in their major-studio films at the time — he’s also slow and has virtually no sense of pace. In a story that cries out for the rich, chiaroscuro atmospherics of film noir, the only sequences that aren’t plainly lit are the courtroom scenes — which are filmed with the faces of the characters spotlit against a black backdrop. Obviously this was due to budgetary limitations — William Berke Productions clearly had neither access to a stock set of a courtroom nor the money to build one — but it gives those scenes an odd visual distinction lacking in the rest of the movie,

As with so many dull so-called “thrillers” from the 1930’s, one can’t help but wish Corruption had been made at Warner Bros., with one of their speedfreak directors and James Cagney as Butler (generally Cagney did quite well in stories that had him framed by political bosses, like Each Dawn I Die and The Strawberry Blonde); no matter how much Roberts was able to goose up Preston Foster from his usual on-screen torpor, he still wasn’t Cagney and he didn’t have the depth and power as an actor to play the role for maximum effect.

Chasing Rainbows (MGM, 1930)

2009-12-05T02:37:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Corruption I screened Charles Chasing Rainbows, a musical MGM filmed in 1929 but didn’t release until 1930 — at a time when Hollywood was starting to run scared from the musical genre because, aside from Depression-related jitters that economically stressed people might simply stop going to movies altogether (which didn’t really start to happen until about 1931 or so), audiences were beginning to get tired of the flood of musicals they had been inundated with starting with The Jazz Singer and the advent of sound, since the musical was the one common film genre that really couldn’t be done in the silent era. Chasing Rainbows was clearly an attempt by MGM to duplicate the incredible success of The Broadway Melody — they used two of the same stars, Charles King and Bessie Love, and in a committee-written script (“dialogue” by Charles Riesner, who also directed, and Kenyon Nicholson, based on a “scenario” by Bess Meredyth and Al Boasberg, based on an “adaptation” by Wells Root of an original story, Road Show, by Meredyth and Robert Hopkins) they tried to strike the same combination of musical and soap opera that had made The Broadway Melody appealing and popular.

MGM production chief Irving Thalberg also cast Jack Benny in it after Benny’s success as the MC in the plotless Hollywood Revue of 1929, and interestingly he picked a story that, though it’s a backstage musical, takes place not in the weeks leading up to a big show’s Broadway opening but on a later and far less “sung” phase of show business: the touring companies that are sent out after a show’s run on Broadway, usually with much less prestigious cast members. Chasing Rainbows also has a refreshing honesty about people’s sex lives characteristic of the so-called “pre-Code” era; the show’s leading lady, Peggy (Gwen Lee), leaves the cast in mid-tour to go off with a sugar daddy (Eugene Borden), leading stage manager Eddie Rock (Jack Benny) scrambling for a replacement. At first we think he’s going to give the part to chorus member Carlie Semour (Bessie Love), who joined the cast with her former vaudeville partner Terry Fay (Charles King) when he got offered the male lead, but in fact he sends to New York for a new star, Daphne Wayne (Nita Martan). Carlie is in love with Terry, but Terry can’t keep his eyes off other women; Daphne notices this and vamps him, figuring that she can get him to marry her and the two of them can become Broadway stars together — and once she’s established on the Main Stem she can dump him and go off with the man she’s really in love with, Don Cordova (Eddie Phillips), who’s playing the second male lead.

As if that weren’t confusing enough, there are also comic-relief parts for Marie Dressler — as the show’s comedian (she sings two songs, reminding viewers with long memories that she’d been a singer on Broadway and had starred in the musical Tillie’s Nightmare, in which she’d made the song “Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl” one of the biggest hits of the early 20th century, though that’s probably not well known by people who know the show only from the movie Mack Sennett made of it, Tillie’s Punctured Romance, in which Dressler made her film debut but the movie was stolen by Charlie Chaplin, for whom it was a star-making part even though he was playing a villain instead of his sympathetic “tramp”) — and Polly Moran as the dresser. MGM actually built up Dressler and Moran into a comedy team for a while, patterning them loosely after Laurel and Hardy — Moran the skinny, flighty one and Dressler the larger and presumably more grounded one — and on the strength of this movie they were put into a series of vehicles, mostly with one-word titles (Politics, Prosperity, Reducing) and with George K. Arthur (who’s also in this film) as their male sidekick and stooge.

A major problem with Chasing Rainbows as it stands is that the big musical numbers, “Happy Days Are Here Again” (this was the film that introduced that song), “Everybody Tap,” “Love Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues” (which was recorded by Frank Trumbauer’s orchestra on September 18, 1929 with Smith Ballew singing) and one of Dressler’s big features, “My Dynamite Personality,” aren’t in the extant print. They were shot in the two-strip Technicolor process and have completely disappeared — they don’t even survive in black-and-white like the color numbers from The Broadway Melody and Sunnyside Up do — so the Turner Classic Movies print puts production stills accompanied by instrumental versions of the film’s score (at least one of which is a jarringly modern recording) and runs subtitles describing the numbers (and the plot action that’s supposed to be happening during them) to fill in the gaps left by the missing numbers.

This obviously doesn’t help a modern viewer assess whether this was a good movie in 1930 — especially since cutting out four of the numbers unbalances the movie and makes it seem less musical and more soap opera than it no doubt did “complete” — but on the evidence it seems like Chasing Rainbows was a good but disjointed and clunky film that didn’t always take full advantage of the talents of its cast. Bessie Love is good but she gets way too many moments of intense emotional traumas, mostly over Charles King’s faithlessness — she’s good but all those scenes get awfully wearing after a while! Marie Dressler dominates the cast — as she did even up against Greta Garbo in Anna Christie — mainly because as a veteran of both stage and silent film, she instinctively understood acting for talkies far better than most of her co-stars — and while they’re not a patch on Laurel and Hardy, she and Moran work well together and generate sustained merriment if not too much out-and-out laughter. Though only one of Dressler’s songs, “Poor but Honest,” survives in the extant print, it’s a great novelty number and makes it clear that she had real musical talent as a comedy singer.

Nita Martan as Daphne also gets a novelty song, “Do I Know What I’m Doing?” (later reprised in a gag version by Dressler and Moran), and she’s surprisingly good as both singer and actress and we wish we could see more of her. As for Jack Benny, he’s there — he’s a bit hard to recognize at first (mainly because he isn’t wearing the glasses he wore by the time his radio show made it onto TV) and, though he’s doing some of his familiar gestures and vocal inflections (the finger on the cheek, the “Wel-l-l-l … ” vocable) and his timing is excellent, the script (even with one of his future radio writers, Al Boasberg, as his gag man) gives him precious little to say or do and Benny is handicapped (as he generally was in his early films) by the fact that he hadn’t yet developed his radio character, which put all his talents in a frame that was devastatingly entertaining and hilarious. Chasing Rainbows was a box-office flop — in his memoir Benny wrote, “The exhibitors renamed it Chasing Customers” — and “Happy Days Are Here Again” had to wait two years for Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign to adopt it as a theme song and make it a hit.

Ironically, Thalberg renewed Benny’s contract and even gave him a raise from $850 to $1,000 a week (in 1930!), but didn’t give him anything to do; apparently seeking to squirrel Benny away from anyone else who might help him become a movie star, he neither gave him an MGM assignment nor allowed him a loanout to work at another studio, and it was only when Earl Carroll offered Benny the comic lead in the 1931 edition of his Vanities that Thalberg, reasoning that the New York stage wasn’t a competitor he needed to worry about, released Benny from his contract and allowed him to resume his career.

Horror Island (Universal, 1941)

2009-12-01T17:45:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I ended up running was Horror Island, yet another item in the Universal Horror Classic Movie Archive box and a rather quirky exercise in doing an old-dark-house thriller without any real horror stars. It’s the old chestnut about the young layabout who doesn’t want to hold down a normal job, and who happens to have inherited a mysterious island that was once used as a hideout for pirates. The layabout is Bill Martin (Dick Foran) and he’s partner with the comic-relief character, Stuff Oliver (Fuzzy Knight), in what appears to be a deep-sea fishing business but also encompasses any wild scheme Bill thinks is going to make him money at the moment. He’s also in the habit of denying that he’s ever in because most of the people who want to see him are bill collectors or process servers, but one man who does get through his defenses is a one-legged sailor named Tobias Clump — an odd character name for someone who’s made up to look like a Gypsy and is played by a Latino actor, Leo Carrillo — who claims that the island Bill inherited was once the hideout of the legendary Henry Morgan and that there’s a buried treasure worth $2 million.

Bill hits on a brainstorm: he’ll organize a trip on his boat, the Skiddoo, to Morgan’s Island and promise everyone who goes with him a treasure hunt at $50 a throw. He also has Stuff wire up a sound system on the island and put skeletons around the various rooms so people will get the idea the castle is haunted. While all this is going on Bill also crashes his car into a fancy one bring driven by upper-class girl Wendy Creighton (Peggy Moran) and her upper-class-twit boyfriend de jour, Thurman Coldwater — played by Lewis Howard as the sort of effete incompetent John Eldredge usually played, while Eldredge himself is in this movie but in a different sort of role: as Bill’s unscrupulous cousin George who wants to take the island off his hand for $20,000. Tobias claims to have half a pirate treasure map and says that the other half was stolen from him by “The Phantom” (Foy Van Dolsen, the closest thing to an actual horror star in this film), a sinister figure shown only in the shadows and wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a cape to look appropriately sinister. The film takes about 23 minutes of its running time just taking care of all these preliminaries — including a scene that’s supposed to be surprising but would have been a dead giveaway in 1941 to anyone who’d seen The Mummy’s Hand (which used the same plot gimmick) a year earlier: Jasper Quinley (Hobart Cavanaugh), a resident professor who’s an expert on the history of piracy, gets a look at Tobias’s half-map and declares it a fake, so we just know he’s going to be part and parcel of the skullduggery at the end.

The Skiddoo sets sail with a weirdly assorted group of passengers, including Wendy, Thurman, Professor Quinley, a couple of gangster types (one male, one female) who seem to have some sort of design on the treasure, and Our Heroes — who are startled when someone throws a last-minute package to them on the boat and it turns out to be a bomb. They’re even more startled when they arrive on the island and encounter strange sights and sounds that aren’t part of Stuff’s fakery, and after 35 minutes of picturesquely photographed doings (the cinematographer was Elwood “Woody” Bredell, warming up for major credits later) the big revelation is that the professor is the real mastermind behind the plot to do away with the rest of them and grab the treasure for himself — only he’s killed when a booby-trap on the treasure door, an ax that falls when the key is turned on the keyhole along its handle, works and drives itself through his back. Charles was wondering who planted the bomb — my guess was that “The Phantom” was in cahoots with the professor and he did it — and it turns out the “treasure” is just worthless junk but the mysterious man who’s been following Bill around all movie (and who may have been the male “gangster” aboard the boat as well) turns out to be from the U.S. Navy with an offer of $100,000 for the island so they can turn it into a naval base (well, it started as a naval base for the pirate Henry Morgan, so in a weird way this is just returning it to its original function!).

Horror Island is a bit on the dull side — even at just an hour it still comes dangerously close to overstaying its welcome — but the human characters are appealing enough (and well acted by a group of professionals earning their pay without being especially inspired or “artistic”) and what goes on at the island is mildly scary even if hardly “horrific.”

The Black Cat (Universal, 1941)

2009-11-30T15:50:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film last night was The Black Cat, a Universal horror-comedy made in 1941 and not to be confused with the marvelously surreal (it was a spacey script to begin with and got even more confusing when first the American and then the British film censors got through with it!) 1934 horror film The Black Cat, also from Universal, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Karloff isn’t in this one, but Lugosi is — playing a manservant, as he would in the later Night Monster, though this time in thick makeup that seems to have been intended to make him look like a Gypsy and therefore justify his ineradicable Hungarian accent. The plot of the 1941 The Black Cat has nothing to do with that of the 1934 version, and neither has anything to do with the plot of the Edgar Allan Poe short story “The Black Cat” which both films claim as their inspiration.

The 1941 The Black Cat is that old familiar chestnut about the greedy relatives waiting impatiently for the family patriarch to die — only in this case it’s a family matriarch, Henrietta Winslow (Cecelia Loftus), who may be in a wheelchair and on death’s door but she’s still determined to give her family members a hard time as they sit around her living room waiting and hoping for her to croak soon. Henrietta is a mad eccentric who built a huge mansion and lived in it alone except for a pride of cats; she took them in, gave them food and houseroom, and built a special crematorium in her backyard (accessible directly from the house through a secret passage that, like most such devices in movies, is only discovered by accident midway through) whereby she could cremate her cats when they died. What’s more, she made the oven big enough to cremate a human, so she could be disposed of in the same way as her cats when the time came. The only wrinkle was that she absolutely forbade any black cats on the premises because she considered them harbingers of death — though she built a statue of a black cat in her crematorium and a black cat has sneaked onto the premises anyway and made itself at home with the other cats.

She ultimately gets stabbed with a knitting needle in the crematorium, after she’s read her will but before she’s revealed that she’s put in a codicil that the money she’s willed her family members will only be paid out once her maidservant Abigail (Gale Sondergaard, who plays in such a superb battle-axe fashion she makes Judith Anderson in Rebecca — a part Sondergaard was actually considered for — seem warm and fuzzy by comparison) — and the cats all die. The family members are a bit hard to get straight — they include her grandson Montague Hartley (Basil Rathbone), his brother Richard (Alan Ladd, billed 11th in the original credits but second in the Realart reissue trailer also included in this DVD — obviously they moved him up after the explosive success of This Gun for Hire made him a superstar at Paramount), Montague’s wife Myrna (Gladys Cooper), a grandson from a different son-in-law named Stanley Borden (John Eldredge as the milquetoast, as usual) whose father was a brilliant architect who passed on none of his talent to his son, and a few other miscellaneous descendants: Elaine Winslow (Anne Gwynne), whom Henrietta wills the bulk of her estate because “you’re the least bad of all of them,” and Margaret Gordon (Claire Dodd).

But the real stars of the film are the ostensible comic-relief players, distant relative “Gil” Smith (Broderick Crawford), who’s hoping to sell Henrietta’s house and all its belongings; and Mr. Penny (Hugh Herbert), the person he’s hoping to sell it to, who comes along with a little hand drill to put holes in the furniture and call them wormholes so they’ll be worth more in the antiques market. Herbert is a good deal funnier than he was in some of his Warners vehicles but he still outwears his welcome pretty quickly, and in turns of screen time the oppressive presence of Broderick Crawford makes him the real star of the film, no matter what it says in the billing. At least two of the writers, Robert Lees and Frederick Rinaldo, were also better known for comedy (they were industriously cranking out the Abbott and Costello vehicles for Universal at the same time this was made, and producer Burt Kelly was also supervising A&C) — the other writers were Eric Taylor and Robert Neville, and the director was Albert S. Rogell, not exactly atop the “A” list of the time but still a better-known filmmaker than most of the hacks who churned out these things for Universal.

The filmmakers were obviously trying for the same marvelously nervy mixture of comedy and horror James Whale and his writers, Benn W. Levy and R. C. Sherriff, hit in the 1932 film The Old Dark House, and though they don’t come anywhere near hailing distance of Whale’s masterpiece the 1941 The Black Cat is a charming little film that tweaks a few of the genre conventions — even though Lugosi is wasted, as he usually was on his rare excursions back to the major studios by 1941, and Rathbone could have made more of an impression with more screen time but still acts the scenes he does have with his usual power and authority. At one point Broderick Crawford’s character says of Rathbone’s, “He thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes” — an in-joke reference to Rathbone’s two films as Holmes for 20th Century-Fox in 1939 (The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) and possibly also an advance promotion for his upcoming series of 12 Holmes films for Universal.

The 1941 Black Cat is hardly in the same league as the marvelous 1934 film of the same title, but on its own it’s suitably light-hearted (despite the murders and the mild scare scenes) and entertaining — and Orson Welles saw it when it first came out and decided, on the basis of the marvelous chiaroscuro lighting and atmospheric camera angles, to hire its cinematographer, Stanley Cortez, to shoot The Magnificent Ambersons (also a film about a dysfunctional family inhabiting a crumbling old Victorian mansion). Still, there have been better “takes” on the situation of a bunch of greedy relatives with their hands out awaiting the death of a rich person in their family — and it did occur to me that as long as Universal wanted to do a dark comedy around this situation, they might have been better advised to buy the film rights to Puccini’s opera Gianni Schicchi and put their legendary comedy star, W. C. Fields, in the lead!

Angels & Demons (Sony/Columbia, 2009)

2009-11-28T14:32:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I had a chance to show Angels & Demons, the much-ballyhooed follow-up to The Da Vinci Code — likewise based on a novel by Dan Brown featuring the character of Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon messing around in a mystery involving the Roman Catholic Church. (Just about everything written about these movies or the books they’re based on has taken pains to point out that “symbology” is a nonexistent academic discipline Dan Brown made up for his fiction — presumably lest credulous students flock to colleges asking to major in it.) I read Angels and Demons before I read The Da Vinci Code — though after the sensational success of The Da Vinci Code had made Dan Brown a worldwide household name — and by chance I happened to be reading it, a novel set around a conclave of the College of Cardinals to elect a new Pope, just as John Paul II finally died and a real conclave occurred, though it passed with far less melodrama than the one depicted here: it elected Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, former head of the modern-day descendant of the Holy Inquisition, in one ballot.

Anyway, Angels and Demons not only seemed to me a better book than The Da Vinci Code, it seemed a better movie as well — even though there’s an annoying bit of dialogue early on that turned it from a Da Vinci Code prequel into a sequel. Though many of the creative principals remained the same — director Ron Howard, producer Brian Grazer, writer Akiva Goldsman (bolstered this time around by David Koepp) and star Tom Hanks — Angels and Demons came off as a more successful thriller, better paced and lacking the biggest weakness of Da Vinci Code the movie — the deadly seriousness with which the material was presented and the resulting slow, stately pace as if Howard and company were filming a literary masterpiece instead of an engaging potboiler.

Well, this time around Howard discovered (or rediscovered) suspense pacing and created an exciting, relentless thriller out of Brown’s plot: the Pope has mysteriously died and a secret sect that claims to be reviving the Illuminati (actually an 18th century organization founded by Adam Weishaupt and a favorite of conspiracy-mongers ever since) has kidnapped the “Preferiti,” the four Cardinals who had been the favorites in the Papal election. One of the inspirations for this book was John Langdon, an artist who managed to create several Gothic-lettered “ambigrams” — meaning a piece of writing that looks the same upside down as it does right-side up — with the word “Illuminati” as well as the four classical elements: “Earth,” “Fire,” “Water” and “Air.” (Brown got the last name of his central character from his artist friend.) The gimmick is that the Illuminati plan to murder all four kidnapped cardinals, one each hour from 8 to 11 p.m., and then at midnight they plan to detonate a nuclear device consisting of pure antimatter and therefore vaporize the entire Vatican and thus destroy the church worldwide.

They acquired the antimatter from the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, and the chief scientist in charge of the project is murdered and his assistant Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer) joins forces with Langdon in a chase across Rome despite the opposition of the Swiss Guards, the official force guarding the Pope (basically to him what the Secret Service is to the President) and the apparent assistant of the Camerlengo (Ewan McGregor), who was Italian in the book but is Irish here. The Camerlengo is the chief assistant to the Pope and takes over the administration of Vatican City for the nine days after a pope’s death that the College of Cardinals meets in secret session to pick his replacement. He’s easily the most engaging character in the film (as he was in the book as well) — his only real competition is Cardinal Strauss (Armin Mueller-Stahl), the avuncular chair of the conclave and one who agrees to take that post to beg off on any papal ambitions himself — and therefore anyone familiar with Dan Brown’s fiction and its recurring patterns will just know that he’s going to turn out to be the bad guy at the end (though Charles guessed it would be Cardinal Strauss who turned out to be the bad guy and mastermind of the whole plot).

It seems that after having been taken in by the previous Pope when he was still a child, the Camerlengo grew up in the Vatican with the Pope as essentially a father figure — and served him until he was ready to make an accommodation with the scientists doing research at the Large Hadron Collider and accept the so-called “God particle, “ the Higgs-Boson particle that supposedly is what causes things to have mass, not as a threat to Catholic belief but as the final proof from the scientific world that God indeed exists. To the Camerlengo, that’s heresy, so he kills his Papal benefactor and hatches a plot to take over the church himself by creating the illusion that the Illuminati have reorganized and the church is at war with them; he will eliminate the four principal competitors to the papacy, stage a spectacular last-minute rescue (when the antimatter bomb is found, he takes it up in a helicopter and then bails out, so the bomb will explode safely in mid-sky) and get himself elected Pope by acclamation, whereupon he’ll lead a new Counter-Reformation aimed at extirpating any connection or hint of a peace between religion and science.

As a plot line, it’s a perfectly serviceable premise for a thriller even though it’s hardly any more than that — like The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons is a simple adventure tale masquerading as a meditation on God and man’s place in the universe — but it’s well done, it’s engaging, it’s (faintly) credible within the conventions of the genre and, though there are a few risible moments, overall it’s a much better movie than The Da Vinci Code: more engaging, more exciting and simply more fun.

Road House (20th Century-Fox, 1948)

2009-11-28T13:39:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Wednesday night Charles and I watched two movies, one from a recent DVD purchase and one I’d recorded off TCM the same night. The new recording was Road House, a pretty good 1948 film noir about the rivalry between long-time friends Jefty (the odd first name is short for “Jefferson T.”) Robbins (Richard Widmark) and Pete Morgan (Cornel Wilde), co-owners of Jefty’s Road House, an odd establishment in a small town called Elton, 15 miles from the Canadian border (screenwriter/producer Edward Chodorov, adapting an “original” story by Margaret Gruen and Oscar Saul, carefully tells us Elton is 15 miles from the Canadian border but omits what U.S. state it’s in), and the falling-out between these old friends — not only have they known each other literally since boyhood, but Jefty actually took Pete in after they served together in World War II and allowed him to live in the road house as well as co-own and co-manage it. All that changes when Jefty hires singer/pianist Lily Stevens (Ida Lupino, top-billed and so hard-boiled one suspects you could strike a match on her face) for $250 a week for six weeks — twice her usual going rate — with the obvious intention of getting into her pants.

The first half-hour of Road House, directed by Jean Negulesco at 20th Century-Fox just after he had been fired by Jack Warner (ironically after having had the biggest success of his career to that time, Johnny Belinda — just as Warner fired John Huston after The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Key Largo; those films may have made money, but Warners’ number one grosser in 1948 was Doris Day’s film debut, Romance on the High Seas, and Warner decided that melodrama and noir were out and staked the future of his studio on more musical vehicles for Day) and with two other Warners refugees involved, studio head Darryl F. Zanuck and star Ida Lupino.

In his interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for the 1969 book The Celluloid Muse, Negulesco recalled that when he handed him the script for Road House, Zanuck told him, “This is a bad script. Three directors have refused it. They don’t know what they’re doing, because it’s quite good. Remember those pictures we used to make at Warner Bros., with Pat O’Brien and Jimmy Cagney, in which every time the action flagged we staged a fight and every time a man passed a girl she’d adjust her stocking or something, trying to be sexy? That’s the kind of picture we have to have with Road House. Now take it and do it like that.” Negulesco didn’t quite catch the insouciance of the Cagney-O’Brien buddy pictures (though Zanuck’s remark is indicative that he saw Widmark as another Cagney type, able to imbue psychopathology with a fascinating overlay of charm and a bad-guy actor who could also be used as a good-guy action hero, as he’d be in Panic in the Streets two years later), mainly because it was 1948 instead of the mid-1930’s and the moment for such high-spirited male-bonding pictures had passed and the Zeitgeist had got darker, at least in the movie world.

For the first half-hour Road House shines, mainly on the strength of Chodorov’s hard-boiled dialogue (especially for Lupino), and while it sags a bit in the middle it picks up again in the final third, when Jefty finds out just when he’s about to propose to Lily that she’s really in love with Pete, and he wreaks an unusual revenge on Pete: he frames him for stealing $2,600 from the road house’s weekly receipts (he admits to taking the $600 he was owed as a partner, but no more) and gets Pete paroled into his custody, thereby turning Pete into a virtual slave — and as the final reels progress Jefty gallops towards total psychopathology and threatens the lives of both Pete and Lily until Lily steals his pistol and shoots him in self-defense just as Jefty is about to crush her with a boulder.

Among the interesting attractions of Road House are Ida Lupino’s non-vocals — she can’t sing in the usual sense but she can croak out songs like “One for My Baby” and “Again” (written by the film’s musical director, Lionel Newman, with lyrics by one Dorcas Cochran, and like “The Four Winds and the Seven Seas” it was a hit for Vic Damone but was sung far better by Mel Tormé) with just the right sort of world-weariness and borderline competence one would expect from a singer at the level of talent and status in the business the script tells us she is — even though Celeste Holm had the second female lead (Susan, who works at the road house and has an unrequited crush on Pete even though she’s enough of a good sport to help Pete and Lily get together at the end) and I could readily imagine her thinking, “I was in Oklahoma!, one of the most successful musicals of all time, and I have to listen to Ida Lupino get all the songs?” I was also amused by one particularly imaginative use of music; in one scene Lily and Pete are hanging out in a boat on the lake near the road house, and as they listen to the radio Lily recalls that her mom wanted her to be an opera singer and that ambition got dashed when she suddenly lost her voice — and the piece on the soundtrack is “Elsa’s Dream” (“Einsam in trüben Tagen”) from Wagner’s Lohengrin, appropriate because like Elsa, Lily is hoping for a knight-like figure who will love her and get her out of her virtual enslavement to the bad guy.

About the only real weakness in Road House is the casting of Cornel Wilde — he’s a boring actor who never took to film noir and the incandescence of Richard Widmark (oddly billed fourth, even after his great success in Kiss of Death) and Ida Lupino makes him seem even worse by comparison. I can’t help wishing they could have got someone more to the noir manner born — someone like Robert Mitchum, Alan Ladd or even Dick Powell — instead of Wilde, who seemed to have used up all his great moments when he played Chopin.

Night Monster (Universal, 1942)

2009-11-28T13:36:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie we finally did watch last night was the companion piece to Wednesday night’s last movie, Captive Wild Woman, on the Universal Horror: Classic Movie Archive collection: Night Monster, a quite engaging 1942 piece of atmospherics produced and directed by Ford Beebe (who’s got short shrift in the histories of Universal horror because he was best known as the director of the Flash Gordon serials, but I’ve loved The Invisible Man’s Revenge so much over the years I took Beebe’s dual credit as a hopeful sign — and I was right) and a rather quirky rewrite of the already quirky film The Old Dark House overlaid with physical disability (or the appearance of same), an (East) Indian swami, a possibly insane woman and a revenge plot directed against the medical profession.

The plot: a New England small town near a fog-shrouded seacoast lives in fear of the so-called “Night Monster,” which emerges from the fog to wreak havoc. Its first victim — at least the first one we actually get to know — is Milly Carson (Janet Shaw), a housemaid who threatens to report the sinister doings at the Ingston Towers, the sinister old pile where she works, to the police. Laurie (Leif Erickson, whose presence here puts the rest of the cast one degree of separation from James Dean — Erickson and Dean appeared together in that rather odd 1951 Roman Catholic TV production called Hill Number One, based on the last days of Christ with Erickson as Pontius Pilate and Dean as the Apostle John, which when we watched it together Charles described as “an infomercial for rosary beads”), the Ingston family’s chauffeur, offers her a ride to town after housekeeper Sarah Judd (Doris Lloyd) fires her for threatening to talk, but midway to town Laurie parks the station wagon and tries to rape her (shown with surprising explicitness for a “post-Code” movie!).

She gets out of the car at the first opportunity and, of course, is a sitting duck for the Night Monster — only as the monster gets her, Dr. Lynne Harper (Irene Hervey) a passing motorist who’s had trouble with her own car, hears her screams. Shortly thereafter Dr. Harper, who’s been summoned to Ingston Towers to treat the mentally unbalanced Margaret Ingston (Fay Helm), gets a ride to Ingston Towers from Dick Baldwin (Don Porter), a mystery/horror writer who’s on his way to Ingston Towers for reasons screenwriter Clarence Upson Young doesn’t pause in his exposition long enough to explain. Ingston Towers is owned by Margaret’s brother, Kurt Ingston (Ralph Morgan), who has summoned three doctors of his own — Dr. King (Lionel Atwill), Dr. Timmons (Frank Reicher) and Dr. Phipps (Francis Pierlot) — because they attempted to treat him for something or other and committed such spectacular medical malpractice that they left him in a wheelchair and with blackened hands and arms so withered that he can’t pick up anything for himself. (There’s a fascinating scene of the chauffeur Laurie literally picking Kurt up and cradling him like a baby as he carries him from his bed to his wheelchair — and I couldn’t help but think how that goes against everything I’ve been taught about how to transfer a chair-bound person.)

There’s also Rolf (Bela Lugosi, inexplicably top-billed and probably grateful for the chance to be working at a major studio again even though it’s a nothing part and just about anyone could have played it), a sinister butler who pushes down the hang-up button on the house phone just when Milly is trying to call out with her warning to the police; and Agor Singh (Nils Asther), a swami who’s teaching Kurt an East Indian trick of mind-over-matter, as well as Sarah Judd — who runs the household with such fierce authority she makes Judith Anderson in Rebecca seem like Mother Teresa by comparison, ordering about not only the other servants (including a broken-looking man named Torque, played by Cyril Delavanti, who staffs the front gate of the grounds of Ingston Towers and seems to have been the prototype for the equally sinister doorman in Manos: The Hands of Fate).

Night Monster has a plot — several plots, actually — that makes almost no sense at all, but rarely has that mattered less: cinematographer Charles Van Enger’s chiaroscuro lighting and vertiginous moving-camera shots maintain the atmosphere, and the performances are generally excellent — particularly Fay Helm’s; she bathes every line in acid and creates a far more credible villain than the real “night monster” — who turns out, as just about every hardened moviegoer either in 1942 or now would have no trouble guessing, to be Kurt Ingston, who’s been able to overcome his disability by means of the mind-over-matter discipline Agor Singh taught him; in the finale, he’s shot in the back by one of the local cops just as he was about to take out Dick Baldwin and Dr. Harper, while meantime back at Ingston Towers, Margaret Ingston declares that the house and the entire family are evil and she’s going to burn the place down (evoking both The Old Dark House and Rebecca!), which she does, taking out nasty ol’ Sarah Judd at the same time and confounding at least one set of audience expectations: one expected Dr. Harper to be able to cure Margaret instead of Margaret totally losing it at the end. Night Monster is yet another one of those triumphs of style over (lack of) substance and proof that as late as 1942, with the batteries of their original Laemmle-era inspirations running pretty low, Universal could still create a neatly unsettling, entertaining old-dark-house thriller with a fair quotient of chills.

Captive Wild Woman (Universal, 1943)

2009-11-28T13:30:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Certainly Night Monster is a much better movie than Captive Wild Woman, its DVD disc-mate which Charles and I watched Wednesday night right after the 1948 Road House (itself not to be confused with the 1989 Patrick Swayze vehicle of that name, which was not a remake but a totally different story). Captive Wild Woman seems to have had two purposes in mind: to create a distaff version of the Wolf-Man character and to recycle quite a lot of footage of African jungle animals — particularly lions and tigers — Universal had left over from a 1933 semi-documentary called The Big Cage, which had starred real-life animal trapper and trainer Clyde Beatty (referred to here as “BEE-tee,” by the way — I’d always assumed the name was pronounced “BAY-tee,” but it wasn’t), including a lot of footage showing Beatty from the back cracking a whip at the lions and tigers to keep them in line. (I’ve read that, unlike lions, tigers are totally untamable — and it’s noteworthy that the filmmakers of The Big Cage created the illusion of tame tigers by running footage of them in slow motion and sometimes reversing it so the tigers appear to be backing up on Beatty’s cue.)

Captive Wild Woman had a committee-written script — Ted Fithian and Neil P. Varnick, story; Griffin Jay (three years before his career nadir, The Devil Bat’s Daughter) and Henry Sucher, screenplay — and it was directed by, of all people, Edward Dmytryk, who had already had his big commercial breakthrough the year earlier with Hitler’s Children at his home studio, RKO. Why Universal thought this piece of committee-written cheese needed the services of a loan-out director when any number of in-house hacks could have done a similar job with it is a mystery — and, assuming he actually had a choice in the matter, why Dmytryk took the job is an even bigger mystery. (Fortunately, the next year he would make the film noir masterpiece Murder, My Sweet and firmly establish himself on the “A”-list, a status broken only by his blacklisting as one of the Hollywood 10.)

Captive Wild Woman centers around a circus owned by John Whipple (Lloyd Corrigan) which has just commissioned Clyde Beatty to do an animal act involving mixed breeds — 20 lions and 20 tigers in the same ring at once — despite the rivalry between the two species. When Beatty (who is never seen in the film) backs out, Whipple reluctantly accepts the offer of his assistant trainer, Fred Mason (Milburn Stone, who didn’t usually play romantic leads but whose short, stocky build enabled him to match the footage of the real Clyde Beatty from The Big Cage), to run the act. Meanwhile, Mason’s girlfriend Beth Colman (Evelyn Ankers, playing yet another screaming damsel in distress), another member of the circus troupe, is worried about her sister Dorothy (Martha MacVicar, later known as Martha Vickers and superb as Lauren Bacall’s sister in The Big Sleep and in her own right in The Big Bluff), who’s ill with unspecified ailments that Beth is convinced can best be treated by the internationally renowned glandular specialist Dr. Sigmund Walters (John Carradine, top-billed and in a way warming up for his role as a mad scientist who literally invents a new gland in 1957’s The Unearthly), who’s convinced that by manipulating glands one can literally transform one species of animal into another.

To do this he takes Cheela (Ray Corrigan), a female gorilla (so Ray’s casting here is both trans-specific and transgender!) who was delivered to the Whipple circus, and manipulates her glands so she becomes a human female, Paula Dupree (Acquanetta). Paula signs on to help Mason do his animal-taming act at the circus, since she seems to have a mysterious power over the animals; the problem is she also falls in love with Mason, and when she realizes he only has eyes for her human-born rival Beth, the shock sends her into a devolutionary spiral and she ends up regaining her ape form. This pisses off Dr. Walters no end, especially since in order to govern her behavior he had to sacrifice his long-suffering nurse, Strand (Fay Helm), by splicing her cerebrum into Cheela’s/Paula’s head to bolster her higher brain functions. Captive Wild Woman has some things going for it, including an exciting final sequence that cross-cuts between the circus (a bolt of lightning has flipped out the animals in the middle of Mason’s act and caused them to escape, predictably panicking the crowd) and the gorilla-turned-human-turned-gorilla-again on the loose, ultimately saving Mason from being clawed to death by the untamable lion Nero, only to be picked off herself by a local police officer who either ignores or simply doesn’t hear in time Mason’s entreaties not to shoot the ape.

Also, the were-ape makeup by Jack P. Pierce is one of his better late creations — for my money even more convincing than the Wolf-Man getup — and John P. Fulton’s double-exposures are hauntingly beautiful and surprisingly believable in documenting the woman-to-ape change. But it doesn’t help that Acquanetta, though certainly easy on the eyes, literally can’t act at all — maybe audiences “read” her non-performance in this film as the dramatizaton of a character literally new to human existence, including human language; but she talked in that same dull first-day-of-acting-school way in later films (like the Lon Chaney, Jr. Inner Sanctum vehicle Dead Man’s Eyes) in which she played human-born humans. For some inexplicable reason, Captive Wild Woman was successful enough that Universal made two, count ’em, two sequels to it — Jungle Woman (1944), in which Acquanetta repeated her role and haunted a college campus; and Jungle Captive (1945), in which actress Vicky Lane took over as the apewoman. Seen today, though, Captive Wild Woman has little to offer other than the animal footage and a cool efficiency to the direction — it probably wasn’t a credit Edward Dmytryk was proud of, though at least it didn’t do his career any long-term harm!

Our Mother’s Murder (Morgan Hill/Universal/USA, 1997)

2009-11-28T13:04:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Lifetime movie I watched this morning was actually one that had been on the USA Network back in 1997, originally titled Daughters but now called Our Mother’s Murder — which rather gives away the ending. The story is based on the true-life tale of newspaper heiress Anne Scripps Morrell (Roxanne Hart), who divorced her first husband Tony Morrell (Ryan Michael) for reasons writer Richard DeLong Adams doesn’t bother to explain. By the time the film opens Anne’s daughters Alex (Holly Marie Combs, top-billed) and Annie (Sarah Chalke) are about ready to get out of high school (“prep school,” actually, they being rich kids in upstate New York) and go on to college when mother Anne suddenly starts dating Scott Douglas (James Wilder), a remodeling contractor she met in a sports bar while they were watching the Super Bowl. Things move quickly as Scott marries Anne, impregnates her and thereby creates a new daughter, “Tory” (short for Victoria), then reveals himself to be an alcoholic and wife-batterer — and with Mom intimidated into silence by fear, particularly the fear that Scott will disappear with Tory and so she’ll never see her new daughter again, it’s up to Alex and Annie to try to save their mom from this creep who’s, predictably, stealing her blind as well as making her life hell.

She gets up enough gumption to divorce him, but then her lawyer tells her that since she can’t prove she’s been abused — it’s just your word against his, she’s told — she can’t keep Scott from having a parental role in their daughter’s life, and the courts will look more kindly on her petition for sole custody if she at least tries to reconcile with him. She accordingly does so, letting him move back in with her and putting up with his presence and the fear he instills in her as much as possible. Things keep going like this, with the Morrell daughters putting their own romantic lives on hold until they can be sure their mom will be safe, until the holiday season — where Anne’s attempt to get an order evicting Scott from their house is frustrated by the fact that the courts are closed for the holidays, and on New Year’s Eve Alex goes out with her boyfriend Jimmy (Jonathan Scarfe) — he’s got a cottage for the weekend so they can be by themselves, Annie gets invited to a party and goes, and Scott takes advantage of having Anne home alone by sneaking into her place and bashing her head in with a hammer. She hangs on in the hospital for six days until she croaks, he abandons his car and leaves the murder weapon behind, and eventually he’s found three months later drowned in the Hudson River after it melts during spring thaw.

It’s not much different from your average Lifetime movie (though it seems to have at least a brief theatrical release since its imdb.com page lists an MPAA rating) but it’s unusually well done, directed quietly but suspensefully by Bill L. Norton, Adams’ script could have tapped some of the darker aspects of his tale — we really don’t get much of an idea of What Makes Scott Run, whether he’s a conscious gold-digger who loses control of himself and the situation or a troubled young man in over his head from the start, who responds to his uneasy situation (including the likely sense of being “unmanned” by living off his wife’s fortune) by getting drunk and lashing out at his wife. It’s also not clear just why he kills her or how he hopes to get away with it — assuming he does hope to get away with it and is thinking that rationally as a criminal, which is debatable — but on the whole Our Mother’s Murder makes sense as drama.

It’s generally well cast (though Sarah Chalke doesn’t look credible either as Roxanne Hart’s daughter or Holly Marie Combs’ sister) and, not surprisingly, the actor who comes off the best is James Wilder, not only because the villains in these sorts of tales are usually more interesting than the heroes but also because he’s drop-dead gorgeous — far better looking than the general run of blankly semi-attractive lanky, sandy-haired men Lifetime usually casts as its male leads — and he doesn’t make Scott more of a schemer than he should be. Wilder also ably depicts the character’s surface charm and knows just when to drop the mask and let us see the monster beneath. I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t more than just one brief soft-core porn scene between Wilder and Hart — not only would more of their sex life have added directly to the entertainment value, it would also have made it more believable that Anne would stay with him despite being abused (I’ve heard from people who’ve actually been victims of domestic violence that one reason they stayed in their relationships as long as they did was “the make-up sex was fabulous!”). Despite the dorky title (though Daughters was so ambiguous it would hardly have been better!), Our Mother’s Murder is actually one of the better things I’ve seen on Lifetime, a nice mixture of emotion and thrills that one only wishes could have had a happier ending.

House of Horrors (Universal, 1946)

2009-11-24T21:58:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran another item from the Universal Cult Horror Collection box: House of Horrors, a generically titled 1946 effort that I’ve always quite liked even though it’s notorious as the next-to-last film made by Rondo Hatton, a genuinely tragic figure whose real life was much more compelling than any of his movies. Hatton was born on April 22, 1894 in Hagerstown, Maryland and in 1912 moved with his family to Tampa, Florida, where as a young man was quite attractive, a star high-school athlete and very popular. All that changed when he went to fight in World War I, was caught in a German poison-gas attack, and survived but contracted acromegaly, a rare disease in which the body overproduces human growth hormone and the extremities swell up to grotesque proportions. Hatton got a job after the war as a reporter with the Tampa Tribune, and in 1930 he was covering the location trip of a movie company shooting a film called Hell Harbor. His grotesque appearance caught the eye of the film’s director, Henry King who gave him a small role in the movie.

According to imdb.com, he also played a juror in the 1931 William Wellman masterpiece, Safe in Hell, but then didn’t work in films again until 1936, when he and his second wife had the idea of moving to Hollywood and allowing the movie companies to exploit his real “monstrous” face and gait. He was mostly cast in minor roles — albeit sometimes minor roles in quite important movies like In Old Chicago, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, The Ox-Bow Incident, The Moon and Sixpence and the 1939 Dieterle/Laughton version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame — until 1944, when Universal signed him and decided to give him a major buildup as a horror star. They launched his new career by casting him as a mute, monstrous murderer in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce film The Pearl of Death, an adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Six Napoleons” in which Hatton played an invented character, “The Hoxton Creeper,” the hired-gun killer used by master jewel thief Giles Conover (Miles Mander) to knock off anyone in the way of his pursuit of the Borgia Pearl.

Universal used him again in movies like Jungle Captive and The Spider Woman Strikes Back and then decided to launch his career as a monster star with House of Horrors — shot under the working titles Joan Medford Is Missing (which doesn’t happen until the final reel!) and Murder Mansion (there isn’t a mansion — murderous or otherwise — in the film at all). Universal used writer Dwight V. Babcock to concoct an “original” story for Hatton’s monster-star debut, George Bricker to turn it into a screenplay and (a boy named) Jean Yarbrough to direct — and the surprise is that House of Horrors, though made at the tail end of Universal’s Gothic horror cycle, turned out to be quite good.

Part of the film’s quality comes from Yarbrough’s flair for Gothic atmosphere — unlike William Nigh with The Strange Case of Dr. Rx, Yarbrough emerged from the salt mines of the sub-“B” studios (in his case PRC instead of Monogram) and actually took full advantage of the resources of a major studio with state-of-the-art production facilities; he and cinematographer Maury Gertsman included some extensive moving-camera shots, dark, chiaroscuro lighting, appropriately doomy music from the Universal stock library and an overall aura of chill far above most of the routine Universal horror product of the time. Another plus is the performance of Martin Kosleck, an actor best known for playing Joseph Goebbels twice (in 1944’s The Master Race and 1962’s Hitler) and perfectly cast here as Marcel Delange, an artist who creates clay sculptures of oddly distorted figures that look fine to me but arouse the ire of vicious art critics F. Holmes Harmon (Alan Napier) and Hal Ormiston (Howard Freeman).

The film opens in Delange’s studio, where he is lamenting that all he has to live on is bread and cheese, and at night he has to work by candlelight because he couldn’t afford to pay his electric bill, but he’s hopeful that a rich collector, Mr. Samuels (Byron Foulger), will buy one of his works and allow him to eat a decent meal, feed his cat all the milk the animal could want, and get his lights turned on again. Alas, Samuels arrives at Delange’s studio with critic Harmon in tow — and Harmon viciously assaults Delange’s work and gets the artist so mad he throws both of them out of his studio, then smashes the sculpture Harmon just talked Samuels out of buying. Delange then walks to a convenient river and is about to End It All by throwing himself in, whereupon he sees someone else in the water and rescues him instead.

The man he’s saved is “The Creeper” (no other name, though in the imdb.com listing for Hatton he’s identified as “Hal Moffet” because that was his name in the next “Creeper” movie, The Brute Man). Once the two are together, the plot draws on such unlikely ancestors in the Universal canon as The Bride of Frankenstein (the monster taken in and befriended by a stranger) and the 1935 The Raven (the monster exploited by a madman for personal revenge). Delange wins the Creeper’s affections by buying him food (albeit with the Creeper’s own money: $3 he found on the Creeper when he pulled him out of the river) and being nice to him, and in return the Creeper faithfully goes out and murders the art critics he hears Delange rail against. In the course of his tirades Delange takes care to give the Creeper the addresses of the people he wants to kill, thereby turning his attentions from knocking off women (it’s established early on that he’s become a wanted killer because of his habit of approaching women on the street for sex; when they inevitably scream at the sight of him, he attacks them with such force that he breaks their spines) to becoming Delange’s avenging devil.

Mixed up in all of this is commercial artist Steve Morrow (Robert Lowery, two years before he became the movies’ second Batman), who does girlie pictures for magazine covers and has also attracted Harmon’s ire because, as Harmon puts it, “No girl really looks like that.” (Actually Joan Fulton, the actress playing Morrow’s model, really does look that good.) The plot incidents are pretty predictable — it ends with Morrow’s girlfriend, art critic Joan Medford (Virginia Grey), trapped in Delange’s studio; she convinces the Creeper that Delange means to turn him in to the police, and so the Creeper kills Delange and is about to kill Joan as well when the representative of the official police, lieutenant Larry Brooks (Bill Goodwin), who had previously suspected Steve of the murders because he and Harmon had a public argument, shoots the Creeper through the window of Delange’s studio and thereby saves Joan’s life.

It’s not a particularly ambitious movie, and Hatton’s appearance inspires more sympathy than fright — which I actually think is a good thing. Harry and Michael Medved, in their book The Golden Turkey Awards, nominated Hatton for their “P. T. Barnum award for the Worst Cinematic Exploitation of a Physical Deformity” (the other nominees were conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton in Chained for Life, Billy Curtis in the 1973 gangster spoof Little Cigars and the winners, the entire cast of The Terror of Tiny Town), but despite his difficult-to-look-at appearance Hatton actually strikes notes of pity and pathos — maybe not the kind of pathos Boris Karloff could have achieved if he’d been playing this part in one of Jack P. Pierce’s makeups (ironically Pierce gets screen credit for this film where he didn’t for the first two Frankenstein movies, despite the crucial importance of his famous makeup to those films’ success), but still an oddly moving performance that suggests (as does his actual biography) that Hatton was a decent and loving human being under those grotesque gas-distorted features.

Aside from that, House of Horrors plays out with a cool professionalism, ably recycling admittedly well-worn materials and a much better film than the two other “new” items in the Cult Horror Classics box, The Strange Case of Doctor Rx and The Mad Ghoul. (The fourth and fifth films in the box, Murders in the Zoo and The Mad Doctor of Market Street, are both ones Charles and I had seen relatively recently and quite liked, Murders in the Zoo for its unusually graphic violence for a 1933 film and both for Lionel Atwill’s underplayed urbanity as the villains of the pieces.)

Hatton lived to make only one other film, The Brute Man, produced at Universal with the same director and writers (with M. Coates Webster added to the writing team this time), but the combination of Hatton’s death on February 2, 1946 (from two heart attacks in rapid succession — apparently heart attacks are a side effect of acromegaly) and Universal’s decision to merge with International Pictures and get out of the “B”-movie business led Universal to sell the rights to The Brute Man to director Yarbrough’s old stomping ground, PRC. Ironically, two years earlier PRC had made a film called The Monster Maker that used acromegaly as a plot device — as did Universal’s 1955 film Tarantula.

The Gay Falcon (RKO, 1941)

2009-11-24T21:56:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards Charles and I watched The Gay Falcon, a 1941 detective thriller from RKO that was at least nominally based on Michael Arlen’s good-bad detective-thief character, The Falcon. RKO’s inspiration for making a series of movies based on The Falcon was that Leslie Charteris, creator of Simon Templar a.k.a. The Saint, had pulled the rights to his character and left RKO scrambling to find a replacement character that could be played by the same actor, the urbane and sardonic George Sanders. RKO even advertised the film as “Fiction’s slickest super sleuth, created by Michael Arlen and portrayed by the star who thrilled you as ‘The Saint,’” and, as William Everson noted in his book The Detective in Film, “All that was really retained of the original stories was The Falcon’s fondness for the ladies and the smoothness with which he moved in high society. … With George Sanders starring, the movie series did little more than change his name from the Saint to the Falcon.” Indeed, the movie series did so little more than change the character’s name from the Saint to the Falcon that Leslie Charteris actually filed a plagiarism suit against RKO, though there doesn’t seem to be a record of how it turned out.

The Gay Falcon is also the only one of RKO’s many Falcon movies (the first three starring Sanders, the next one — The Falcon’s Brother — co-starring Sanders and his real-life brother Tom Conway as brothers, enabling the writers and producer to kill Sanders’ character off at the end of the film and continue the series with Conway in the lead as the original Falcon’s brother) to be based on an actual Michael Arlen story — and if all the Arlen Falcon tales were as dull as this one, it’s no wonder RKO sought out other writers for the later episodes (including buying Raymond Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely for the third Falcon film, The Falcon Takes Over, in 1942 before remaking it two years later as Murder, My Sweet with Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe and Edward Dmytryk directing).

The Gay Falcon is an incredibly dull movie that seems a good deal longer than its actual 67 minutes, with a surprisingly uninteresting plot line about the priceless “Monsoon Diamond,” prize possession of Mrs. Vera Gardner (Lucile Gleason, surprisingly effective as a society woman given that she usually played the proletarian wife of her real-life husband, James Gleason), who brings it to a party hosted by Maxine Wood (Gladys Cooper), despite the fact that Wood’s parties are becoming notorious because at each one of them, a woman is robbed of her jewels. There’s a lot of back and forth between the two women in the Falcon’s life, fiancée Helen Reed (Wendy Barrie) and Elinor Benford (Anne Hunter), who recruits him to get involved in Ms. Wood’s case, and when Mrs. Gardner is murdered at a Wood-hosted party by a member of the jewel-thief ring, the story becomes a whodunit in which to no one’s particular surprise (at least no one who’s seen enough movies to recognize one of the hoariest old clichés when he or she encounters one) Ms. Wood herself turns out to be the mastermind of the ring, stealing the jewels as part of an insurance scam that involves claiming them as a “loss” and collecting on her policies as well as having the jewels herself to dispose of on the black market.

The most interesting aspects of this movie are a quite good villain performance by Turhan Bey as Manuel Retana, one of the actual thieves working for Ms. Wood, and some surprisingly noir-ish compositions from director Irving Reis and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca (who would later shoot some of RKO’s greatest noirs, including Out of the Past). At the risk of sounding like a heretic, I’m tempted to say based on my memories of the later Falcon films that the series actually got better with Tom Conway in the lead — not surprisingly given their real-life sibling status, they were two quite similar “types,” but Sanders comes off as a bit too dour for the role and Conway did the lightness and insouciance of the character better. (Sanders was their actual family name; Conway changed his because he wanted to make it on his own merits and not because people associated him with his already established brother.)