by ·Comments Off on Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, Mervyn LeRoy)

After all his latest musical theater projects have fallen apart due to shaky financing during the Great Depression, fast-talkin’ producer Ned Sparks (in Imitation of Life the following year) has an idea for a sure-fire hit, a musical about “the forgotten man,” the unemployable Depression masses, a dour march through the grim realities of today. When we finally see the play, bankrolled by the secret millionaire/composer down the hall, it looks suspiciously unlike what we were imagining, full of naughty love songs and massive Busby Berkeley numbers in glittering costumes. This isn’t a plot twist or ironic commentary on artistic intentions vs. end results once money gets involved – it’s just an inconsistent movie.

The movie opens with Ginger Rogers, but she turns out to be just a friend of the main characters Polly, Carol and Trixie. Polly is Ruby Keeler (Mrs. Al Jolson, just off 42nd Street), a round-faced innocent cutie. Carol is Joan Blondell (later Mrs. Dick Powell, a successful actress through the seventies), the scheming beauty. And Trixie is Aline MacMahon (mostly a stage actress), the smartass. Polly falls for Dick Powell (star of Christmas In July and Susan Slept Here), the millionaire/composer, and the show is cast and everything is gonna be fine.

Conflict! Powell’s millionaire family finds out about his distasteful dabblings in showbusiness and brother Warren William (Caesar to Colbert’s Cleopatra) comes to town with lawyer Guy Kibbee (noble newspaperman in Power of the Press) to stop all this nonsense and threaten to cut off his fortune. But due to a fake gold-digger plot by Polly’s roommates, William and Kibbee end up falling in love with them, triple-wedding is planned and the show goes on, with a last-minute “forgotten man” musical number to remind us of an earlier point.

LeRoy directed the year after I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and musical scene director Busby Berkeley was on a roll after 42nd Street, and would helm the 1935 sequel himself. Also appearing: Sterling Holloway (Remember the Night) as a messenger boy, Eric Blore (The Lady Eve) as a stuffy rich guy, and Billy Barty (a little guy known for playing babies and hobbits and creatures) as a leering, naughty kid during a big dance scene. Songs include “We’re in the Money” (not exactly in keeping with the Depression theme), the catchy “Pettin’ in the Park,” and a waltz featuring a dance of neon violins, and of course the musical numbers and fun performances are the entire point of the movie, not any of the crap I’ve written above.

by ·Comments Off on The Black Cat (1934, Edgar G. Ulmer)

“Strange about the cat – Joan seemed so curiously affected when you killed it.”
“That was coincidence, I think.”

Another in the great tradition of Hollywood movies starting with great actors playing interesting characters in cool locations, then throwing a bland romantic couple into the middle of it. They’re not as bad as your usual bland romantic couple, these two. David Manners was Harker in Dracula and a main dude in The Mummy with Karloff, and Jacqueline Wells had just costarred in a Tarzan movie.

Lugosi is a Hungarian psychiatrist, a prisoner of war for 15 years, free again and visiting his old friend Karloff, a great Austrian architect. Lugosi plans to confront Karloff and demand back his wife and daughter, whom he suspects Karloff has stolen from him – but he brings along the couple, having just survived a car crash. Jacqueline stumbles in all dazed and woozy, and they give her a narcotic and tell her to sleep (“SLEEEEEP”), excellent medical advice.

“Are we not both the living dead?” Lugosi (whose character name sounds too much like Fetus) has “an intense and all-consuming horror of cats,” which I suspect will come up again later in the movie. Lugosi’s daughter turns out to be alive, 18 years old and sleeping with Karloff. Karloff is also a satanist, keeping Lugosi’s wife’s body suspended in his basement. So they sit down for a game of chess – winner gets to keep the body. It’s a ludicrous movie, and closes with a meta-joke about its own melodramatic craziness.

The beginning and end of Ulmer’s major-studio Hollywood career – he had a major hit but fell in love with the wrong girl and spent the rest of his life on the specialty and b-movie circuits. Before this, he’d done set design for Fritz Lang (Die Nibelungen, M, Metropolis, Spies) and production and art design for Murnau (Tabu, Last Laugh, Sunrise, 4 Devils) – so the expressionist look to The Black Cat wasn’t just Hollywood ripping off a hot trend, but a 20-year vet of great German cinema importing his own style.

Found a good article by “The Nitrate Diva” about the WWI references and emotional resonance within the film. The story was “suggested” by the Edgar Allen Poe story which was more faithfully adapted by Stuart Gordon recently.

by ·Comments Off on Sanders of the River (1935, Zoltan Korda)

The least well-restored Criterion movie I’ve seen, maybe because it’s the least-worthy, mainly included in the Paul Robeson set for historical reference. Even the movie’s own DVD extras call it “embarrassing.” But Jomo Kenyatta (future president of Kenya) and Robeson were behind it at the time, believing it would turn out much better. It seems semi-competently slapped together by today’s location-shoot standards, though it was the biggest-budget British film of its time.

Robeson hails his unimpressed white rulers:

Leslie Banks, evil hunter of The Most Dangerous Game, now reduced to pleasant englishman, is Sanders, the local colonial ruler, bringing peace to multiple formerly-embattled tribes. Sandy is against slavery, but also against African self-rule, acting the father to his “misguided children”, with second-in-command Lt. Tibbets, never realizing that names like Sandy and Tibbets diminish their authority. He sounds like Dr. Moreau saying things like “I am Sandy who gives you the law. I will punish with a great punishment all those who break the law.” A smiling Robeson is one of the tribe leaders, or at least its representative to the white powers.

McKinney:

All is going smoothly until Sandy comes down with malaria and leaves town for a moment and his replacement Ferguson proves not a strong-enough father-figure to keep his misguided children from fighting. Evil King Muffuletta kidnaps and kills Fergie, and intends to do the same to Robeson’s wife Lilongo (gorgeous Nina Mae McKinney, star of Hallelujah), sending Sandy scurrying back to Africa to make peace. The music is nice, anyway, and there are nude-breasted dancing women (because Africa).

King Muffeletta gets speared:

by ·Comments Off on I’m No Angel (1933, Wesley Ruggles)

Katy’s response to this: Mae West is so weird. It’s true – takes some time to get used to her personality at the start of the movie, as she slowly struts and moans, throwing out quips in a Popeye mutter as everyone who sees her becomes instantly entranced. Then the story gets weird too. Circus star Tira has been dating a rich guy (prolific small-timer Kent Taylor, who’d end up in MST3K-bait in the 1960’s) under the nose of his jealous fiancee Alicia, then dates the rich guy’s rich friend (Cary Grant) instead. Tira ends up suing Grant when he breaks off their engagement due to interference from her pickpocket ex-buddy Slick, acts as her own attorney, winning both the case and Grant. Feels more like she has successfully defended her own promiscuity, coming off as the most sexually liberated woman in movies for thirty years in either direction. The authorities agreed, establishing the production code to shut her up.

I wonder if 12-year-old Jack Clayton (director of The Innocents and Something Wicked This Way Comes) saw Cary Grant’s “Jack Clayton” getting the girl and thought he oughtta get into the picture business.

by ·Comments Off on 5th Ave Girl (1939, Gregory La Cava)

One of those Great Depression movies where a poor girl is inexplicably taken in by a millionaire family (see also: Easy Living). Mopey millionaire Walter Connolly (Twentieth Century) has home problems. His wife (Verree Teasdale, queen of the amazons in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) goes out with her playboy friends and forgets his birthday. His son (future Western star, played one of Wyatt Earp’s brothers in My Darling Clementine) plays around, neglecting his role in the family business. And his daughter is hot for communist chauffeur Mike (not the first classic movie we’ve seen featuring plot points stolen by Downton Abbey).

Out for a walk, Walter runs into down-on-her-luck Ginger Rogers and invites her to celebrate his birthday. After he invites her to stay at the house, he realizes her presence has an electrifying effect on the family, who think he has blatantly taken a mistress. Ginger is glad to not have money problems for a little while, but the family drama gets to her and she finally runs off until rescued by son Tim Holt.

Maybe the best Ginger movie we’ve seen yet. Features the great Franklin Pangborn in a small role. Katy also recognized Jack Carson as a ukelele-playing sailor. We’ve lately seen him as Cagney’s frenemy in The Strawberry Blonde and Myrna Loy’s hot neighbor in Love Crazy.

by ·Comments Off on The Most Dangerous Game (1932, Ernest Schoedsack)

Catching up on some early Criterion releases – this was filmmakers Schoedsack and Cooper and star Fay Wray’s precursor to King Kong. The Old Dark House, Island of Lost Souls, Vampyr and Freaks were also released in 1932, an amazing year for horror and horror-hybrids.

Leslie Banks (protagonist of The Man Who Knew Too Much) lords over a tiny jungle island where he hunts and kills people who shipwreck on his trap reef. Fellow hunter Joel McCrea (eight years before Foreign Correspondent, which was previously the earliest of his movies I’d seen) escapes a boat full of boring disaster-bait yachtsmen, and pals up with Fay Wray, while her doomed drunk brother (Robert Armstrong, the Jack Black of the original Kong) is killed offscreen. Banks, a great villain who might’ve seemed hammy had Armstrong’s drunk routine not far out-hammed him, chases the young couple with his bow, rifle, dogs, and mute guard played by Noble Johnson, a black actor in white-face. McCrea lays traps, which pro hunter Banks detects, and the good guys only win because of a lucky cliff fall.

The story by Richard Connell (who also cowrote Thrill of a Romance) has been filmed a million times, starring the likes of Sid Haig, Jane Greer and Richard Widmark. Good, short movie with some slick motion-camera shots.

by ·Comments Off on Stranded (1935, Frank Borzage)

Katy asked what makes a Borzage movie unique. I can answer regarding the silents I’ve seen – Seventh Heaven, Street Angel, Lucky Star and bits of The River. But after watching this, I don’t know – it seems that he was ground into the Hollywood sound-film factory, only managing a couple of cool (second-unit?) location scenes and one evocative shot involving would-be-lovers separating in front of a staircase.

George Brent doesn’t help the movie one bit. His character is a huge asshole, and the last-minute happy ending features him becoming very slightly less of an asshole. Fortunately the movie belongs to Kay Francis (of the great Trouble in Paradise), who works at Travelers’ Aid, which appears to be a general help booth at a train station. Bridge-builder Brent (of Dark Victory and The Spiral Staircase) goes there in search of a runaway drunk employee, recognizes Kay, and is soon threatening marriage.

On the bridge project, gangster Sharkey (Barton MacLane of The Maltese Falcon) secretly gives the workers booze, which they happily drink on the job until one falls to his death, causing a near-strike. The workers are portrayed as easily-led, drunken children – weren’t union construction jobs hard to come by during the Great Depression? Kay saves Brent’s ass, leading him to stop badgering her to quit her job, with help from fired drunk Janauschek (Robert Barrat, a judge in The Baron of Arizona).

Frankie Darro, the guy inside Robbie the Robot in Forbidden Planet, plays Hollywood’s typical “Jimmy”, a young, naive annoyance. Future director Delmer Daves wrote the screenplay, based on a story called Lady with a Badge. I don’t believe Kay had a badge.

by ·Comments Off on Jericho (1937, Thornton Freeland)

First Paul Robeson movie I’ve seen. Looks unpolished, with clumsy sound recording, but Robeson’s performance shines right through. Jericho saves some guys in a sinking ship, during which a real asshole of a superior officer is killed, so Jericho ditches the army leaving friendly Captain Mack (who refers to his black soldiers as children) to take the punishment. Jericho steals a boat containing drunken white sailor Mike (Wallace Ford, lead clown in Freaks), who follows like a dog for the rest of the picture (Jericho calls him “boy”). They get to Morocco, where Jericho uses his medical skills to gain trust, eventually marrying a local and becoming a peace-keeping tribal chief. Mack (Henry Wilcoxon, propagandist preacher in Mrs. Miniver) gets out of prison, is kicked out of the army, and searches the world to get his revenge on Jericho… but of course they team up at the end. Robeson also performs a helluva version of “My Way” (not the Frank Sinatra song) against a stormy desert backdrop. Criterion calls it “his most satisfying film role” so I guess the rest of the box set will be downhill.

by ·Comments Off on The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, Alfred Hitchcock)

Some boring rich vacationers casually befriend a spy who is immediately killed, shot whilst dancing. Their daughter is kidnapped to shut them up. The couple (Leslie Banks, star of The Fire Raisers the same year, and Edna Best of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir) sulks back to Britain sans daughter, deciding that if they can’t tell the police, at least they can solve the case themselves. Actually, espionage and adventure isn’t for ladies, so Banks goes off on his own.

Banks and Wakefield go to the dentist:

A sinister dentist is dispatched with his own gas, and I didn’t exactly get the involvement of a basement-dwelling cult (“The Tabernacle of the Sun”), but wooden chairs prove to be good defence against revolvers, and the place gets trashed. Some delightful villains emerge, much more colorful than the heroes (despite an aborted attempt to involve a monocled uncle, Hugh Wakefield of Blithe Spirit, as comic relief). Prominently-chinned Frank Vosper (who’d soon die falling off an ocean liner) and frown-mouthed nurse Cicely Oates would’ve been fine, but Peter Lorre…

DCairns:

Frank Vosper is a good sleazoid bad guy (the only obvious thing Hitch took from Waltzes), but obviously Peter Lorre is the important character here. Although the plot throws out a whole gallery of malefactors, including an old lady with a revolver, a threatening dentist, and an evil hypnotist, Lorre dominates effortlessly, just by constantly making strange. Still sporting the carnival-float head of solid fat he modeled in Lang’s M, and decorated with a skunk-like white stripe and a dueling scar to match Banks’, Lorre as “Abbott” drools cigarette-smoke and apologises to the hero after striking him. He’s good-naturedly contemptuous of his own hired hitman, devoted to his nurse, and prefers to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, but his goal is to plunge the world into war.

Trying to rescue his daughter, Banks gets kidnapped too, caught in the villains’ hideout during a massive police shootout after an Edna Best-thwarted assassination attempt at the Royal Albert Hall. Best then shows up at the shootout and saves her own daughter from Vosper, some 70 minutes after the movie pointedly established her as a celebrated sharpshooter.

Pilbeam and Oates:

No insufferable child actor, daughter Nova Pilbeam is a daughter worth saving, out-acting both of her parents at times. She would return as star of Hitch’s Young and Innocent. This was the first of Hitch’s six Gaumont movies, and Lady Vanishes (more vacationers caught up with spy rings and kidnappings) was the last. Must now watch the ones in between.