by ·Comments Off on The Roaring Twenties (1939, Raoul Walsh)

Felt like following the early-30s gangster movie with a late-30s one. Apologies to Hawks, but this one’s much better, despite the shouty narrator explaining very recent history to the audience. Auto mechanic Cagney, bartender Bogart, and posh law student Jeffrey Lynn (Whiplash) are thrown together during WWI, then after the war Cagney can’t find work and turns to bootlegging with backing from new friend Gladys George (who’s also in postwar drama The Best Years of Our Lives). Schoolgirl Priscilla Lane who’d written him letters during the war is now a grown hottie and aspiring singer, so Cagney uses his power to get her nightclub gigs.

Things are looking good, then they bring on Bogart, who has no morals and starts killing people and getting them in trouble with the cops and rival gang led by sharp-chinned Paul Kelly (Adventure in Sahara). When Cagney calls a meeting for an all-gangster alliance Kelly doesn’t show, drops off the body of their man Frank McHugh instead. Nothing left but for the girl Cagney loves and the girl who loves him to watch his downward spiral ending in a hail of bullets – but belatedly. First Bogart takes over the business, years pass, Cagney becomes a drunken cabbie, the hottie marries the lawyer, old grudges resurface, hail of bullets.

by ·Comments Off on Scarface (1932, Howard Hawks)

Guess I watched an old disc when the 4k remaster is right around the corner, oops. Big showy camera moves in an early sound film, impressive. A good start towards dialogue based cinema, also a cavalcade of atrocious accents. It’s the Ferrari Theory, or just typically Italian: the accents can be as random as you want if the picture is on point. Ben Hecht (and maybe an uncredited Hawks) had written one of the great silent gangster movies Underworld, then after Little Caesar and Public Enemy started a craze, they came back to claim their throne.

Rich party thrower Louis is shot dead, Paul “Scarface” Muni was supposed to be his bodyguard. Scarf’s new boss is Johnny Lobo (Osgood Perkins, grandfather/namesake of the Longlegs director). During Johnny’s rise to the top, Scarface kills all their competition except dapper Boris Karloff, then comes for him too, then kills his own boss and steals his girl Karen Morley. But Scarf is also overprotective of his sister Ann Dvorak, and after he catches her with his prize henchman George Raft, the siblings have got nobody left but each other, and go out in a hail of bullets.

Scarfie having a moment with his sister:

Mabel has parrots:

by ·Comments Off on À nous la liberté (1931, René Clair)

Pre-Modern Times ironic drama equating schools and assembly-line workplaces with prisons. Henri Marchand gets out of prison and looks up his cellmate-escapee Raymond Cordy (Wooden Crosses) who now runs a phonograph factory.

Now being chased by both criminals and cops, the two guys weigh their options: friendship, money, status, escape – and come to the correct conclusion.

by ·Comments Off on Blonde Venus (1932, Josef von Sternberg)

I have to think about this one, was expecting Marlene in her glory, but she plays the loving wife of a vindictive Herbert Marshall who becomes a stage star to pay his medical bills then risks her family for a fling with Cary Grant. Sternberg can’t help dragging his stars through the mud, but at least we get the image of Dietrich in an ape suit.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched January 2024

AMC Theaters 1200 AD (2023, Damon Packard)

Heavily AI-assisted parody of the Nicole Kidman AMC ads, a grudgingly multiplex-supporting voiceover with face-melting visuals.

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The Man Who Couldn’t Miss Screenings (2023, Damon Packard)

Both better and worse than AMC Theaters. It’s mainly a slo-mo “Comfortably Numb” music video, toggling between a laptop dude arguing with his angry wife about the importance of screenings and a a street scene where an electric car has burst into flames, with an Albert Pyun tribute postscript. For me, who has not overdosed on 2023 AI imagery, the mutant characters and text, everything looking like a botched render, it’s all aesthetically interesting.

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Pool Sharks (1915, Edwin Middleton)

Two absurd men fight at a picnic, Proto-WC-Fields vs Checkered Suit Guy, leading to a game of stop-motion pool. Checkered Suit Guy might’ve been Billy West sideman Bud Ross.

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The Golf Specialist (1930, Monte Brice)

A house detective’s hotwife flirts with every guy then her husband beats them up. She goes to watch WCF golf – he never hits the ball, being upstaged by his idiot caddy. WCF with his worst mustache yet, thriving from here out in the sound era, drawing laughs by being mean to children and dogs. Hotwife Shirley Grey went on to costar with Lugosi in Hammer’s first horror film, The Mystery of the Mary Celeste.

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The Barber Shop (1933, Arthur Ripley)

Fields in his element, muttering comic insults at people. He encourages his pun-loving young son, and collects two upright basses as setup for some late prop humor. A wanted bank robber (Cocoanuts flimflam man Cyril Ring) comes in to crank up the drama, not that we needed suspense when we’re getting lines like “I belong to the bare-hand wolf-chokers association.”

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The Pharmacist (1933, Arthur Ripley)

Sound is awful on this one, and rude things are done to a cockatoo. Another crime story / police chase into the shop, whole place gets shot up. Unsatisfying ending involving the daughter’s boyfriend. Maybe I watched one too many of these in a row. Daughter’s boyfriend Grady Sutton is maybe the only person to appear in both My Man Godfrey and Rock & Roll High School, the daughter would go on to play “Saloon Floozie” in a Marlene Dietrich movie.

Will Sloan in Screen Slate:

As with the Marx Brothers, Fields’s work enjoyed a revival in the ‘60s and ‘70s among college kids who took him as an anti-authoritarian hero. He has been less visible in recent years, but he would have been well known to the writers of shows like Saturday Night Live, SCTV, Late Night with David Letterman, and The Simpsons in their most important years. If his contemporary presence is indirect, it is still prevalent.

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Also watched in January:

by ·Comments Off on More Frank Tashlin Cartoons

A follow-up 14 years later.

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Porky in the North Woods (1936)

Porky’s wildlife refuge is an animal paradise, but an illegal french trapper invades, mutilates the forest creatures then whups porky’s ass, so the forest army fights back. The commentary guy knows all the song snippets Carl Stalling is playing and tears up listening to them.

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Porky’s Poultry Plant (1936)

Such fast cutting as chicken farmer Porky hops into a prop plane to defend the chicks from hawks. Tash’s first WB cartoon. Comm says original Porky voice actor Joe Dougherty brought his actual speech impediment to the role before Mel Blanc took over… structural ripoff of Disney’s Silly Symphonies but more modern and violent… Tashlin is described as a “rumpled unsociable fellow.”

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Now That Summer is Gone (1938)

Less-fun musical picture, a squirrel who loves gambling loses the family acorn supply to a grifter – his dad in disguise, teaching him a lesson. Writer Fred Neiman’s only credit before leaving the cartoon game (I dutifully wrote that down from the commentary, but who is Fred Neiman?).

Kosher acorns:

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Puss n’ Booty (1943)

Back to black & white… the cat has eaten a pet bird and hidden the evidence so the family orders a new canary. After a prolonged cat & bird game, the bird eats the cat – good twist – remade with Tweety & Sylvester in 1948. The Jerry Beck commentary mainly wants to tell us exactly which animators worked on which shots.

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I Got Plenty of Mutton (1944)

WWII meat shortages… Hungry wolf in cabin tries making bone broth, steams a single pea, then goes after the sheep since the sheep dog is off at war. Dressing as a sexy sheep to fool the protective ram backfires, the ram keeps chasing him even after revealed as a wolf, and 15 years before Some Like It Hot.

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Brother Brat (1944)

Today’s tough women in the warplane-riveting workforce need someone to watch their horrific kids while at work, so Porky is enlisted. Baby Butch torments a cat, wrecks the house, and almost murders Porky with a cleaver – I’m not sure what the wartime lesson is here.

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The Lady Said No (1946)

This is… not a Looney Tune, it’s a Daffy Ditty… a stop-motion musical about a sexual harasser in Mexico. He takes the girl who only says no to a restaurant, then she says no to him going back to his old life, and no to birth control, and he’s distraught to find himself a father of a hundred babies. Replacement animation with moving camera, impressive work for a silly little movie.

by ·Comments Off on Five More by Tod Browning (1929-1936)

The Thirteenth Chair (1929)

After London After Midnight came three more Lon Chaney pictures including West of Zanzibar. Now, Browning’s love for headscarves leads him to India, and his love for Hungary leads him to Bela Lugosi. This is quite good for a 1929 sound film, but it hurts to exchange the long, lingering silent facial expressions for inane upper-class British conversational pleasantries. There’s no transitional period, the movie is crammed wall-to-wall with dialogue as if spectators were paying by the word.

Madame LaGrange is played by an actress named Wycherly, which would’ve been a cooler name for her medium character. Yes, we’re back in Mystic territory, and to prove her authenticity she explains the mechanics of the usual tricks used by mediums, then proceeds to her spiritual work uncovering a murderer. Someone dies during the first of two lights-out seances (during which the movie achieves maximum talkie-ness, becoming a radio play) so Inspector Lugosi arrives, and star Conrad Nagel’s girl Leila Hyams emerges as chief suspect, but it turns out some other blonde lady killed both guys.

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Dracula (1931)

Written about this before… watching now with the Philip Glass / Kronos Quartet score, hell yes. The music is mixed higher than the dialogue, as it should be. Now that I’ve seen Thirteenth Chair I have to say this is extremely awesome in comparison, dispensing with the constant dialogue and returning to beautiful image-making with big Lugosi close-ups.

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Freaks (1932)

Wrote about this before, too. More movie-worthy characters in this hour-long film than in Browning’s whole pre-Dracula career combined. Over 50 years later Angelo had a plum role in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Before Dracula, Browning made that Outside The Law non-remake, before Freaks came boxing drama Iron Man, and afterwards was Fast Workers… a comedy?

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Mark of the Vampire (1935)

John Fordian Dr. Donald Meek busts into an inn just as idiot tourists are getting the talk about why we don’t go out at night (bad idea to watch the same night as Dracula since it’s all the same vampire explanations to incredulous people). Inspector Atwill, a large mustache man, arrives to investigate a mysterious death. Fedor and Irena are survivors, swoop-haired Otto is her guardian. Meanwhile, Dracula himself (played as a wordless zombie monster with no suave dialogue) and his undead daughter Luna lurk in a nearby castle. Professor Barrymore arrives to do some Acting, a welcome diversion, while Irena’s dead dad Sir Karell has become a zombie Drac-follower, and Irena has begun acting vampy herself.

Somehow the plot gets even more convoluted, and Browning and Lugosi’s involvement becomes an in-joke, because the “vampires” have only been performers in Barrymore’s Holmesian plot to make swoop-haired Otto confess to killing his friend, hypnotized into re-committing his crime. Good performances in this, though nothing else really works, and the rubber-bats-on-strings technology hadn’t improved since ’31. I liked how no two people manage to pronounce the character names the same way.

Clanker, the Jump-Scare Cat:

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The Devil Doll (1936)

Nobody told me this would be a Bride of Frankenstein ripoff cowritten by Eric von Stroheim. Maybe bitter that another director remade Tod’s Unholy Three with Lon Chaney, he goes ahead and rips that off too. Lionel Barrymore is a banker who got backstabbed by his partners and sent to prison, escapes to get revenge – wrongly(?)-accused man becoming a murderer on the run.

First stop is scientist Marcel (Henry Walthall, the yellow shut-in of Griffith’s House with Closed Shutters) to borrow his shrinking formula. He’s working on miniaturization to alleviate world hunger (isn’t this the plot of Downsizing?) but has a heart attack while shrinking the maid, so his devoted wife Malita (Rafaela Ottiano, who’d worked with Barrymore on Grand Hotel) comes along to continue his research by shrinking some bankers, Lionel hiding in plain sight as an old woman running a doll shop.

First off is nervous mustache banker Arthur Hohl (a cop in The Whole Town’s Talking), then they use a devil-doll to rob the house of Robert Greig (who played butler-typed in Preston Sturges movies). The dolls are mind-controlled by their masters (I missed Marcel’s explanation for this) and this doll-heist setpiece is cool enough to justify the entire movie.. Barrymore wants to see his beloved family members now that he’s out, so he pays disguised visits to his blind mom (Lucy Beaumont, who’d played Lionel’s brother John’s mom in The Beloved Rogue) and his lovely grown daughter (Maureen O’Sullivan started acting at the dawn of sound cinema and died in 1998 in Scottsdale, so she may well have watched Fargo in Arizona like we did).

Malita and tiny assassin:

The third banker is Pedro de Cordoba (a circus player in Hitchcock’s Saboteur), who surrounds himself with police then sweatily confesses that he railroaded Barrymore right as his doll-sized colleague was about to stab him with paralysis/shrink syrup. Malita helpfully/fatally blows up the lab/shop because Barrymore’s mission is done but she wants to go on shrinking things. Happy-ish ending for Barrymore, who meets his daughter and her beau Toto atop the Eiffel Tower, but after all the murdering he’s got to stay on the run. Browning’s penultimate film – he’d turn in one more comedy before forced retirement.

by ·Comments Off on The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939, Sidney Lanfield)

Oft-adapted Sherlock Holmes story – there are three versions just on my must-see list – but I’ve never known what it’s about until now. In fact I’m struggling to recall if I’ve ever seen any Holmes movie, besides the time I watched the first half of Wilder’s Private Life. It’s set on the southwest peninsula of English on the “moors,” AKA the heath, which are either highlands or lowlands, tundra-related, and don’t seem very well defined. Now I’m suspicious about other vague British landscape terms: fens and bogs and derries and what not.

But on these particular moors, Sir Charles is dead, and young Richard Greene (tormented zombie of Tales from the Crypt) has arrived to inherit the estate, asking for assistance from Holmes (Basil Rathbone, evil mesmerist of Tales of Terror) and unimpressive mustache guy Watson (Nigel Bruce, third-billed in Limelight) because of the suspicious wolfy deaths in the area.

Colorful characters: suspicious John Carradine looks after the house, Barlowe Borland is a sideburnsed maniac who enjoys suing his friends, and beardy Dr. Mortimer (Lionel Atwill, star of Doctor X and The Devil is a Woman) is like oh btw I dabble in the occult, and a minute later they’re all having a seance.

Then there’s pretty girl Wendy Barrie (Dead End) and her brother Morton Lowry, a murderous dog-keeper. His dogs bump off a local convict who’d stolen Basker’s clothes. Holmes is seemingly absent from all this, having sent Watson ahead, but has actually been observing in disguise.

Watson, his unamused friends, Holmes:

Killer on the heath moors:

Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope:

Though only billed respectively second and fourth… Rathbone and Bruce’s immediate success spawned the only long-running Holmes film cycle. Rathbone brings unprecedented authority to the part, conveying both the arrogance accompanying Holmes’ intellectual superiority and the irony necessary to complement Sherlock’s full mystique. Meanwhile, scene-stealer Bruce, not quite as (in)famously bumbling as later Watsons, deserves credit for solving an eternal dilemma: his endearing interpretation humanizes the duo’s relationship in a manner similar to Watson’s exaggeratedly humble narration of the stories, and gives the doctor something to do when not participating in the action, just admiring his friend’s brainy prowess.

by ·Comments Off on Love is News (1937, Tay Garnett)

From the Criterion Screwball collection. I’m not great at recognizing or remembering Loretta Young (The Bishop’s Wife) or Tyrone Power (Nightmare Alley), and besides a driving gig for Stepin Fetchit and a sputtering junior reporter scene for Elisha Cook Jr., we didn’t know any of the supporting cast. Fortunately Don Ameche plays Tyrone’s news editor, anchoring the film with his trusty mustache.

Years before Sam Fuller would hit the scene with Power of the Press, all newspaper men are portrayed as celebrity scandal chasers, and Tyrone is the sneakiest of the bunch. Loretta is a rich celeb with an off-again engagement to a count (George Sanders with a silly accent). After Tyrone tricks her into giving him a story, she takes revenge by claiming she’s marrying the reporter so he’ll be hounded by salesmen and other reporters using his own tricks against him. Not as inventive as it might be (and what’s with the hick sheriff’s office six minutes outside NYC whose prison doors keep falling off) and we couldn’t make out half the dialogue, but at least the energy stays high.