The Crowd Roars

He Fits the Part: Ralph Bellamy in Forbidden (1932)

2012-01-24T03:03:00.002+01:00

Forbidden, 1932

This may be the start of a new series: a series on actors and roles who make a surprisingly perfect fit. Every once in a while an actor or actress, no matter how many films you've seen them in, comes up with a zinger and adds a bit of extra sparkle to the film concerned. There are instances like this a-plenty (and innumerable potential pairings for future blog posts), but I'll start with one of my recent favourites - Ralph Bellamy in the 1932 Frank Capra film Forbidden.

Publicity photo, 1932

Forbidden is one of my favourite Pre-Code films. The dialogue is poignant and effective, the performances by both Barbara Stanwyck and Adolphe Menjou are absolutely stellar, and the strange and tragic storyline of a man and woman whose affection for each other lasts truly through thick and thin is full of drama and really effective pathos. It classifies as Pre-Code because the love affair with which this story is concerned is by no means pure or sanctified by marriage as it would be in the years after the censorship code was enforced, but don't let the title fool you - this is no tawdry compromised woman/gangster flick. It's Capra at his most sensitive and subdued and it's surely one of the most enjoyable and affecting films of 1932.

Yet, with all these credits to its name, perhaps the thing I enjoyed most about this film was the performance by the secondary male character in the film, Ralph Bellamy. Bellamy rarely gets credit for being more than a dependable character actor, but in this one he really adds significantly to the overall enjoyment of the film, and for that reason it's worth highlighting his turn as newspaper reporter Al Holland, whose love for Lulu (Stanwyck) is as constant as hers is for her secret paramour and father of her child, Bob Grover (Menjou).

'...the longer they "no" the harder they "yes"...'

'I've decided to ask you to marry me...'

Often cast in thankless secondary leads, Bellamy was nevertheless a likeable presence who, upon further exposure as I gradually work my way through more and more of his earlier films, has grown on me enormously. From the bits and pieces I've read on him, Bellamy seems to be one of those amiable, happy-go-lucky characters who was built to last in large part because he knew how to enjoy himself along the way without indulging in a self destructive streak. His career began at the age of 15 when he ran away from home in Chicago to join a travelling show, and by the time he was 23 ran his own stock theatre company in New York. Before he was 30 years old he made the journey to Hollywood and began a long and successful career that included leading and secondary lead roles throughout the 1930s and 40s. Despite not actually being Irish himself, he was well-liked enough to be allowed into the Irish Mafia, the gang of Irish-American actors including James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Frank McHugh, Pat O'Brien and a host of others who drank and socialised together. Bellamy continued for another 50 years representing his colleagues in the Screen Actors Guild, was in demand as an actor up until the year before his death at 87.

Al and Lulu meet, and Al mistakes Lulu as a governess for the child she had with Grover.

Al Holland, proper 1930s reporter.

Judging by his output, Bellamy appears to belong to the Michael Caine school of acting in terms of choosing his roles - do anything and everything and every once in awhile you'll appear in something good. And when you transplant that philosophy to the 1930s - when an actor might make five or ten films a year, this means that it takes a super-human effort to get anywhere near ticking every one of his films off the 'must-watch' list. Between 1932 and 1936 Bellamy made a wapping 43 films in four years, and these weren't just walk-on, bit parts. In one interview Bellamy said that he worked six to seven days a week at Columbia (known then as 'Poverty Row'), and at one point worked on three films at once!

Stanwyck and Bellamy

Bellamy, at his peak as a handsome romantic interest in Forbidden, 1932.

In Forbidden, a tight melodrama that unfortunately received poor reviews upon its release (which makes you wonder at the embarrassment of riches film critics were dealing with in 1932 - if only they could see what was in store for them), Bellamy plays a cocky young reporter who ages into a bitter, alcoholic newspaper editor holding a torch of Lulu over the decades. If you have a weakness for 1930s newspaper reporters - and would you be here if you didn't? - Bellamy ticks all the boxes and more. In one scene, in which Holland is trying to woo Lulu while she's working at the clippings desk, he's asking her for a date and offers her an apple. Lulu says no, but Holland is sure of himself - 'by me it's this way, the longer they '"no" the harder they "yes"!' To which Stanwyck replies in a feline voice 'pu-lease Miss-ter. Holland...' Bellamy is no matinee idol by the Robert Montgomery or Cary Grant standards, but he sure is charming as the unscrupulous news reporter in Forbidden. He's a muck-raker, unimpressed by local politicians or sentimentality, and has a habit of snacking while he works and misspelling the names of people he's holding a grudge against. In any given scene he's munching on apples, catching peanuts in his mouth or dunking donuts in his coffee - it all adds to his character's vulgar, animalistic charm. And he just gets better throughout the film. He's handsome, dynamic, and for once not allowing himself to be outdone by the male lead who got the star billing. It does make one wonder how Stanwyck could remain faithful to Menjou when she's got the charming, hard-bitten Bellamy chasing after her...

A birthday missed: 99 years of Loretta Young

2012-01-19T22:37:00.001+01:00

Loretta Young, 1934, in all her Pre-Code glory

I'd been thinking of dedicating a post to one of my favourite Pre-Code actresses for awhile and, lo and behold, I missed a perfect opportunity. On 6 January it would've been Loretta Young's 99th birthday.

I say she is one of my favourite Pre-Code actresses specifically because first, I have a decidedly diminished interest in her films after 1934, and second, I think she was one of the best and most naturalistic actresses of the early 1930s. One viewing of her performance in 1932's excellent James Cagney feature Taxi could prove that. Today she's often remembered for the television programme The Loretta Young Show, her love child with Clark Gable, and her seemingly incongruous religious piety (Marlene Dietrich once said "Every time Loretta Young 'sins', she builds a church. That's why there are so many Catholic churches in Hollywood." On a similarly nasty note, when a guest at a house party given by Joan Crawford moved to take a chair Young had just left the hostess cried in mock horror "You can't sit there! Loretta Young has just got up and it still has the mark of the cross on it!")

But if you forget all the stories about swear jars and praying for God to give her certain roles and just stick with the actual films she made you are left with a collection of really great performances in some highly enjoyable movies. She was breathtakingly beautiful, had a style of acting that was ahead of its time in terms of her natural, straightforward delivery, and she added a certain flair to nearly every film she was in, at least during those Pre-Code years. Here are some of my favourites:

Platinum Blonde (1931)

Williams and Young in Platinum Blonde, 1931

Though Jean Harlow was clearly the eponymous blonde, it was Young who gave the more stand-out performance of the two in this excellent early-30s newspaper story about a reporter who falls in love outside his social class. Young is certainly the more beautiful of the two female leads, and her more naturalistic performance has aged much better than Harlow's in this one.

Young and co-star Robert Williams, an actor who, judging by the evidence in Platinum Blonde was most likely an incredible talent who might have had a really interesting career had he not tragically died just days after this film's release, have some great scenes together. There's one adorable scene in which girl reporter Gallagher (Young) and fellow hack Stew (Williams) are discussing his new love interest Anne Schuyler, who Stew thinks has, among other things, an adorable nose. Gallagher secretly pining for Stew herself and when he leaves their table in the speakeasy she has a sneaky peak in the mirror, inspecting her own nose to see what it might be lacking. She creates the impression of a statue of a Greek goddess coming to life, tracing a finger along the line of that perfectly sculpted nose.
While none of the actors really stand much of a chance in their scenes with Williams, Young certainly adds much needed depth to the cast and contributes hugely to the overall enjoyment of this film. Had a lesser actress been in her place this might have turned out as not much more than just another perfectly acceptable but forgettable Pre-Coder. A solid performance and in my opinion one of her best films.

Taxi! (1932)

Young with Cagney and Stone, co-stars
in Taxi!, 1932

This is probably my favourite, and not just because it also features an excellent performance by James Cagney. It's a story that begins as a turf war between small-time independent taxi drivers and a gang-protected consolidated firm, but as the lives of the two main characters Matt (Cagney) and Sue (Young) get caught up in the struggle Matt seeks violent revenge and Sue is forced to deceive him in order to stop him from getting his hands on his intended target and going to prison, or possibly getting killed. It's a great premise for what is in essence a romantic story between the two main characters.

Cagney and Young are terrific together, and Young in particular is excellent in the early scenes with her dad, as she is in those when Sue and Matt eventually marry and settle in an apartment together. The two constantly argue, and Matt has a temper that drives Sue crazy and she frequently tells him so. As one of these arguments heats up Matt raises his hand as if he's about to lose his temper and hit her, but then grabs her face and gives her his oft-repeated, affectionate rebuke "Why, if I thought you meant it..." and kisses her. A perfect mix of toughness and tenderness that gives the film a lot more bite than a lot of other romantic dramas of the period, Taxi! is an absolute classic by either Cagney or Young's standards and a definite must-see for even the most casual classic film fan.

Born to be Bad (1934)

Letty, in mothering mode, in Born to be Bad, 1934

The last of this three-beat tribute was very tricky to choose, and it might just as easily have been Life Begins (1932), Employees Entrance (1933), Midnight Mary (1933) or indeed Heroes for Sale (1933), but I chose Born to be Bad for the scenes between Young and her little boy, Mickey, who she's raised very, very badly. Young plays Letty, a girl who has learned life's lessons the hard way and ends up unmarried with the young son to whom she must show the ropes while still in her early twenties herself. Letty and son scheme together to stage a road accident with a milk truck to get a massive payout from the milk company, are found out, and son is taken away by the courts. Mickey is taken in by the Trevors, a respectable young couple unable to have children (Cary Grant and Marion Burns) and, determined not to lose contact with her son Letty visits the Trevor house plotting to get him back. Instead romance inevitably blooms between Letty and Mr. Trevor.

Chronologically speaking, this one is just on the line between Pre- and Post-Code, but the storyline of a young unwed mother and the blatant adultery that ensues surely places Born to be Bad just before the Code crackdown. Young is terrifically amoral in her mother-son scenes, and utterly overshadows any memory of the fact that Cary Grant was ever even in this film, which is quite a feat in itself. As a whole Born to be Bad may not be the best of her Pre-Code films, but I think one of her best performances.

More classic film references in the news

2012-01-19T14:20:00.000+01:00

The Birth of a Nation, 1915

I promise I am in the midst of writing my own, original material, honest. However the craze for all that is classic film related is still going strong at The Guardian, and two articles appearing today are worth a mention:

Henry K Miller, contributor to publications including Sight and Sound and Cineaste among others, writes for The Guardian Film Blog on The Birth of Film Criticism - 100 years ago today. It's a thoroughly knowledgeable, well researched piece on the first critical film reviews, originating first in the London Evening News. A good read with relevant links for further information.

The second piece is a hilarious report that a cinema in Liverpool was forced to refund a number of customers who didn't realise the film they'd come to see, The Artist, was a) in a reduced screen format (gasp!) b) in black and white (GASP!) and c) silent (faint). I'm not poking fun at Scousers, there are ignorant people everywhere, but this was pretty funny.

The Guardian seems to be silent film crazy

2012-01-16T10:50:00.001+01:00

John Dujardin and Uggie in The Artist

This observation won't be new, but since the success of The Artist, now a three-time Golden Globe winner, The Guardian newspaper has been silent movie mad. The same of course can be said for a lot of the mainstream media, but here in the UK The Guardian has really seemed particularly enthusiastic. Not that I'm complaining, it's lovely to spend that first five-ten (ok, fifteen) minutes of the working day, scrolling through their site and finding a photo of Garbo and Gilbert from Flesh and the Devil on their home page, though I do have to stop myself from getting too worked up when they get some of the minor details wrong. (I could say the same about The Artist, who's adverts use a song from 1937 as the backdrop to a trailer for a film set somewhere between 1927 and 1929, but why nitpick? The film clearly wasn't made solely for people with so pathological an obsession with such minor discrepancies in historical detail.)

So putting those reservations aside, do have a look at just a few of the recent articles pouring praise over the silent era you can find on The Guardian's website:

Lights, camera, quick backflip: the eloquence of silent cinema - A not entirely consistent ode to the acting styles of silent cinema actors (the reference is to Cary Grant's backflip in the blatantly not-silent Holiday from 1938)

Style lessons from silent movie stars - in pictures - No new photos for a true aficionado of silent cinema, but still nice to think that the general public may have had a nose through them. Includes an especially interesting photo of Rudolph Valentino.

The 10 best silent movie stars - in pictures - Another photo gallery attempting to sum up the silent era in ten photos or less. Some surprising omissions - including Clara Bow and Mary Pickford, as one commenter noticed - but some nice photos nonetheless.

And in addition to these recent features, The Guardian's Film Blog has also been running a series called "My Favourite Film" with staff writers and guest commentators including Pamela Hutchinson from the blog Silent London, on her favourite film Sunrise.

A few nice bits and pieces, if only for the fact that it might make a few more readers tune in to silent films...

I Should've Known Better, Part Two

2012-01-15T20:10:00.001+01:00

The Magus [1968] Dir. Guy Green. Starring Michael Caine, Anthony Quinn, Anna Karina, Candice Bergen.

After my wilful disregard for common sense tuning in to 1953's Miss Sadie Thompson, I indulged further down that road of films you've been warned about, the ones where you really should've known better. The next in this line was 1968's The Magus, starring Michael Caine and Anthony Quinn. I didn't mind the risk really, the chance to see Caine and Anna Karina in the same film was, I thought, enough to make it worthwhile. Still, even an elementary level of research reveals that possibly the most memorable bit of folklore about this film is that Woody Allen once said that if he had his life to live all over again, he'd do everything the same except sit through The Magus.

The film is utterly bizarre and, in the words of one Sight and Sound critic, "part of the great 'mind-fuck' tradition" of a certain type of film made primarily between 1960 and 1980. In fact, there is one very strange scene in which Michael Caine is on trial, bound and gagged and watching a parade of weird, nightmarish characters (including Anthony Quinn dressed as a joker) screams "What the HELL?!?!", which in fact would have been an apt choice for the title of this post.

The Magus is based on a John Fowles novel by the same name, and revolves around the shallow, narcissistic Nicholas Urfe, who has arrived in Greece to take up a teaching post. He's haunted by memories of his callous treatment of his ex-girlfriend Anne (Karina), who he ditched without saying goodbye, when he finds a message left on the beach which leads him to Maurice Conchis (Quinn), a local man with a reputation for being a bit crazy. Nicholas visits him, is intrigued by his weird preoccupation with magic, and is drawn in to a strange scenario he can't understand. Maurice and his house servants, and a strange woman who at first seems to be the ghost of his long-dead fiance, appear to be consciously creating and functioning in a dream world. As Nicholas works through the bizarre layers of this household he finds Maurice to be alternately an exiled war criminal, an unorthodox psychologist and a film director. The elaborate game gets more and more complicated but the film ultimately shows itself to be a sort of personal journey in which Nicholas comes to "know himself" for the first time.

This plot synopsis is as close as I am able to get to describing what I actually witnessed, and can add no further insight. It's a film that must be watched, or as is the usual verdict with these things, read the novel instead. Still, the film does provide a few interesting turns by a cast full of established and soon-to-be famous actors. Caine is good, though there are far better films to visit from his 1960s catalogue; the same could be said for Karina, who is very sympathetic but too peripheral a character for such a good actress. Seeing Bergen in this film was strange - for Americans too young to remember her from the 1960s it is nearly impossible to remove from your consciousness the sneering main character from the 1980s TV series Murphy Brown to believe her in the role of what is supposed to be a young ingenue/ghost/schizophrenic/actress. Additionally, for British viewers too young to remember you have an extremely young Roger Lloyd-Pack (Trigger from Only Fools and Horses) in the flashback sequence playing the Young Conchis.

The final verdict - worth a watch for the stellar cast and beautiful location shots, and possibly to understand what all the confusion is about. In the words of Nicholas Urfe, "What the HELL?!?!"

Miss Sadie Thompson (1953) on BBC2

2012-01-12T00:05:00.001+01:00

BBC Two has been airing a string of interesting old films on Saturday afternoons and this Saturday they'll be showing the 1953 film version of Miss Sadie Thompson, starring Rita Hayworth.

I'm not expecting much from this, though I'm certainly willing to be proven wrong. 1950s remakes of classic silent or early sound films always have a sort of sinister blandness for me - take for example the 1950s remake of the near perfect Red Dust from 1932, Mogambo. Clunky, toothless and no hint of chemistry or humour compared to the much more colourful and quick-fire original. I'm sure some will disagree, but I know which one I'd rather watch. And I always second guess the films, now that the subliminal Cold War propaganda of films like High Noon has been pointed out to me...

But back to Sadie Thompson. It may be worth a watch if only for the classic Somerset Maugham's South Seas short story, and to find out how the relationship between Sadie and Mr Davidson, the self-righteous reformer who is trying to save her was translated for 1950s audiences. Miss Sadie Thompson made full use of Hayworth as you can see from the movie poster, with 3-D and musical numbers to boot, but I do fear it's too far removed from the grittier Joan Crawford pre-code version of the same story.

If anyone has come across any bitchy quotes from previous-Sadie Joan Crawford on this one, I'd love to hear them.

Mess with this movie at your peril...

Dickens on Screen at the BFI: The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935)

2012-01-02T18:42:00.000+01:00

David Manners and Heather Angel in
The Mystery of Edwin Drood 1935

Throughout January, the British Film Institute (BFI) Southbank Centre will be showing a run of Dickens screen adaptations, with such interesting rarities as the pre-1914 shorts on Dickens-inspired sources (a few from D.W. Griffith here) intermingling amongst the better remembered classics like David Lean's Great Expectations with John Mills or the George Cukor/ W.C. Fields adaptation of David Copperfield. I've seen a few of these before, but had never seen, or in fact heard of, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a 1935 Universal film starring Claude Rains. While I'm shamefully ignorant of a lot of Dickens' works, and have not yet felt a burning desire to acquaint myself with them (maybe someday), the reliably entertaining combination of Universal horror and Claude Rains was enough to peak my interest. And, as luck would have it, someone has posted the film online, so I thought I'd have a look...

The film begins interestingly enough. Claude Rains plays John Jasper, a choirmaster and lonely opium addict, and he is lying in an opium-induced haze with Zeffie Tilbury, 'The Opium Woman'. Jasper dreams that he sees his nephew Edwin Drood (Manners) and his fiance Rosa Bud (Angel) on their wedding day, and wakes in a crazed panic. This dream reveals Jasper's jealousy of his nephew and his obsession with the girl, who also happens to be one of his students. At the same time, Neville Landless (Douglass Montgomery) and his sister Helena (Valerie Hobson), siblings who have returned to England from Ceylon, disrupt the situation as Edwin and Neville become rival's for Rosa's hand, and then one day Edwin disappears. The mysterious disappearance leads to a really eerily thrilling investigation and climax involving an always excellent Rains and a surprisingly excellent Montgomery in a duel role of Neville and the mysterious old man who comes to investigate.

Edwin Drood was Dickens' last, unfinished, work, and apparently only six of the 12 planned chapters were ever completed, though Dickens had left a summary of how he planned the story to end. This I believe, allowed for a certain amount of artistic license with the story, though that of course would not be out of the ordinary for a film adaptation. The cinematography is meant to be excellent, and you can see from the online video that this is surely the case, though I would assume that, should you attend the BFI screening, this would be only more impressive, particularly the final climax in the crypt, where the disappearance of Edwin Drood is finally explained. The director, Stuart Walker, had just finished the first sound version of Great Expectations (with Drood cinematographer George Robinson) the year before, and would go on to direct Werewolf of London later that year, and you can really see how Edwin Drood fit well in this threesome, with their beautiful, moody Victorian settings and costumes.

While The Mystery of Edwin Drood has not converted me as a new devotee to Dickens or his screen adaptations, it has at the very least reinforced my fondness for Claude Rains and mid-30s Universal horror films, and certainly given me reason to believe Douglass Montgomery was a much better actor than I had ever realised. Certainly worth recommending, if only for fans of Rains, Universal horror devotees, or disbelievers of Montgomery's acting ability.

The BFI's Dickens season is running throughout January, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood will be showing on 21st and 23rd January.

Comfort films: Forsaking All Others (1934)

2011-12-24T22:04:00.000+01:00

Forsaking All Others [1934] Dir. W. S. Van Dyke. Starring Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Robert Montgomery, Charles Butterworth, Billie Burke.

I've not chosen the most original film for which to pay tribute in the second proper post on my return, but this one has a special and slightly shameful importance for me. During my absence I completed my postgrad thesis which involved, among other things, hours and hours and hours and hours... and hours of writing, alone, at home, with the laptop. Never the sort of person who is able to concentrate without background noise to keep me going, during much of the writing process I would keep old films running in the background to keep me company. All were films I'd seen many times before, and some were certainly more conducive to a productive writing session than others. For some reason I was able to get the most done while half-listening Forsaking All Others in the background, which for the purposes of this point, I would consider a 'comfort film'.
I think some of the reasons for the strange relationship between this movie and the writing process are quite easy to explain: for one the plot is hardly demanding, not much more than your typical Joan Crawford vehicle in which one poor leading man on his own simply wasn't enough and the main female character gets wooed from all sides by handsome suitors. The leads themselves, Crawford, Gable and Montgomery, are all pretty good too - probably not doing much more than phoning in a standard performance that was each of their stocks in trade by 1934, but this only adds to the warm fuzzy comfort factor of the film. Finally the dialogue, while not as zippy as say, an Anita Loos screenplay, does have a few nice puns and one liners, which the actors obviously handle with ease.

What is less easy to explain is that while it is so soothing a film, it also has some incredibly irritating element,s preventing it from ever being placed even in my top 50 favourite films. It has all the hallmarks of a typical, mid-30s W.S. Van Dyke film: incredibly opening credits, some incredibly smug over-exuberance (particularly in the early homecoming scene -- alright already!) and then of course the usual high society setting in which nearly no one has a job, and everyone's furniture, walls and floors seem to be a strangely pristine, almost Grecian white. I know this also describes any number of the best loved films of the decade, but it can be pretty brainless in the context of so many other films made during this time.
That said, I still watched the film repeatedly over the space of about six months, could probably recite the lines along with the actors by now, and still find the film to be a nice comfort blanket for similar arduous or stressful situations. With such familiarity, here are a few of my favourite bits...

Scenes from Forsaking All Others

The film opens with Jeff (Gable) returning from some money-making venture in Spain expecting to ask Mary (Crawford), the girl he's been in love with since childhood, to marry him. After much giggling, finger pointing and hopping up and down on the part of Mary and Dill (Montgomery), he finds out that she's already screechingly happy and engaged to Dill, their other childhood friend, and still utterly oblivious to his affections.

Later, left alone with his thoughts, Jeff reminisces over their childhood with a really oddly inappropriate analogy for this threesome as youngsters, saying: 'it was the same then, I blew up the tires and Dill did all the riding'. Eurgghh. This photo is quite funny though, the adult heads of the actors have simply been pasted on to children's bodies (I would assume they're children? Saying that, the hands might be a giveaway, I really can't tell.) Gable somehow looks like a Puritan undertaker's son, Crawford looks WAY too knowing for a little girl that age, and Montgomery looks strangely well matched with the child's body he's been assigned (unless that IS his body?) Quite an odd photo, you'd think they'd just find three actual children and take a picture of them.

Frances Drake made for an excellent villain, though it appears the costume designer wanted to reinforce the wickedness of the ex-girlfriend Connie Barnes by dressing her in a cape that's more than a little similar to the one that would be worn by Maleficent in the Disney cartoon Sleeping Beauty. This is how she makes her entrance, with wicked intentions of stealing Dill back before he can marry Mary in the morning.

Meanwhile the ever-devoted Jeff is ordering a roomful of cornflowers for Mary's wedding day in order to make her dream of being married 'in hundreds of cornflowers' a reality. He and his mutt-like companion Shep (Butterworth) have awoken from the stag party with a brutal hangover and 'between them have managed to get one man undressed' only. It does make you wonder why the director didn't reverse this, unless they were thinking that audiences had already seen Gable's bare chest, maybe this time they'd like to move on to the legs? Otherwise why let poor Charles Butterworth stand around like that?

Connie, in the meantime, has tempted an inebriated Dill to the alter to the alter with her, and thoughtful gentleman that he is wires Jeff the bad news to tell Mary himself that she has been jilted. Mary tries to put on a brave face...

...and goes to the country to breathe the fresh air. There is quite a funny montage in which she drives a speedboat, rides a horse and chops wood, and the ferocity in Crawford's face while chopping wood is intriguing. It reminds me of an article I once read on photographer Phillipe Halsman and his famous series of jumping celebrities in the 1950s, about which Halsman said that he asked the person to jump in order to force them to let their guard down. They apparently would let go of their inhibitions and you could see the real person underneath the celebrity facade. It makes one wonder whether we are seeing the real Joan Crawford in this wood chopping scene?

Getting back to the story, Jeff tries to help Mary forget the incident, even going so far as to spank her with a hairbrush, but Mary is desperate to see Dill again and they meet in secret to take a drive through the country. Both Dill and Mary are clearly still in love with each other, and Dill is desperate to get her alone to try his chances. He fantasises about the two of them leaving the city to run a hamburger stand and live in their honeymoon country cottage. Their car inevitably breaks down along the way, it rains, the heel of Mary's shoe breaks and Dill re-emerges wearing a head bandage. They hightail it to the cottage to wait for a lift back to town, but Dill tells his driver not to bother until the next morning in an attempt to buy a little more time.

The plan goes awry and something approximating hilarity ensues. The two catch cold in the rain and the only dry clothing to be found for Dill is an old woman's dress, Dill falls down the stairs and accidentally sets himself on fire. The next morning when Jeff and the extended friends and family come to frogmarch them back home he finds Dill sleeping innocently on the sofa, and wakes up sneezing recounting his injuries to Jeff in an interesting scene. Robert Montgomery may have been a romantic leading man first, but this scene illustrates pretty clearly how Clark Gable overtook him and everyone else in those stakes by 1934.

Montgomery played the handsome, doe eyed cad in a number of films throughout the 1930s while Gable, initially playing gangsters and tough guys, took a little longer. It wasn't until a few years that Gable became a different type of leading man - more dangerous, more virile I guess. Montgomery is adorable in this scene, but Gable is downright animalistic, particularly when he breaks up laughing at Dill's mishaps the night before. It looks like a tiger laughing at an injured teddy bear. In a dress. As much as I prefer Montgomery, you can't help but make the comparison.

If you need a spoiler alert in order to avoid ruining the ending, really there may be no hope. Mary and Dill reunite, and Jeff is on his way again, but before he leaves confesses to Mary that he'd been in love with her all this time, and is now conceding defeat. You can almost see the lightbulb switching on above Crawford's head as Mary realises it's been Jeff all along - it had been Jeff who'd ordered the cornflowers - which somehow makes all the difference. The real key to her happiness isn't marrying Dill, it's marrying Jeff, and she runs after Jeff leaving Dill standing at the alter in a sort of poetic justice.

Utterly trivial nonsense I normally watch only when no one else is there to judge me, it is at the same time a wonderful comfort film. Crawford, Gable and Montgomery were excellent company, particularly during those last caffiene and panic fuelled all-nighters, and for that reason it seemed only fair to give this bit of enjoyable fluff its due praise.

Another Lanugage (1933)

2011-12-16T06:57:00.004+01:00

Hayes and Montgomery in a scene
from the film

Another Language [1933] Dir. Edward H Griffth. Starring Helen Hayes, Robert Montgomery, Louise Closser Hale, John Beal, Margaret Hamilton.

Having recently picked up a slew of Robert Montgomery films, it seemed appropriate to choose my favourite so far. I've by no means exhausted the 1930s Montgomery catalogue (including two of those now available in the new DVD box set dedicated to him now available from the Warner Archive), but so far I'd have to say that 1933's Another Language is my new favourite. Judging by the few reviews of this film I've been able to find online it looks as though I may be in a minority here, and in one sense I can't blame them. This certainly is an odd film for 1933.

Another Language is a Herman J. Mankiewizc and Donald Ogden Stewart screen adaptation of an original stage play by Rose Franken and it certainly shows. And I do like film adaptations of stage plays. The story follows newly married Victor (known to his family as Vicky) and Stella Hallam, returning from their European honeymoon after a whirlwind elopement. They are returning to New York to meet the family and an assortment of aunts and uncles meet them at the dock - with the notable exception of Mother Hallam. It quickly becomes apparent that Vicky's mother bitterly resents their elopement and resents Stella personally for her perceived attempts to separate her son from the Hallam flock.

Montgomery and Hayes on the set of Another Language 1933

Mother need not have worried, because as Stella begins to see that not only does she not fit in with her new family (the aunts are gossipy and critical and the uncles - particularly Walter - are self-satisfied and frankly moronic), but that they are mounting a full scale attack on her efforts of setting up a life apart for herself and Vicky. Vicky, to her horror, seems to have become a different person to the one she'd married and, manipulated by his mother without realising it, sides with the family. Stella feels completely alone until Vicky's young nephew Jerry arrives home from college. As it turns out he can't stand the family either and the two hit it off. Stella thinks she may have found a friend but Jerry thinks he sees in Stella a dream woman there for him to rescue, to run away from the family and their oppressive, crude and narrow minded ways together.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film despite the claustrophobic atmosphere (much of the drama takes place in either Vicky and Stella's apartment or in the Hallam house and even when the family aren't in the scene their presence is always felt) and in fact liked very much the attention given to the adult theme of family relationships. This film begins after the marriage has already taken place, there are no syrupy sweet children to distract the characters, and there are no real out of the ordinary events that intrude on the domestic world the story focuses on. Instead, the film is able to slowly and subtly reveal the undercurrents present in the relationships of the adult members of the Hallam family. This for me is quite a novelty for what is still a thoroughly a pre-code film.

Surely some of the characters are slightly one-dimensional; Louise Closser Hale while excellent is pretty thoroughly manipulative and the equally wonderful Robert Montgomery as Vicky seems unbelievably blinkered until nearly the end, but as they both serve as the catalysts for much of the drama I think this can be forgiven. Margaret Hamilton, who appeared in the original Broadway play, makes her film debut as one of the aunts, and is very effective, particularly in her scenes with Montgomery.

Hayes, Montgomery and director Edward H Griffith playing
cards between takes

Though I tracked down the film for Robert Montgomery, it is in fact two actors I wouldn't normally have as much time for that provide the best scenes: Helen Hayes as the long-suffering Stella and John Beal as love-struck Jerry. I am aware that Helen Hayes is not particularly well remembered as a film actress, perhaps we had to see her on the stage. I also know that before Another Language I'd only encountered John Beal (who was, incidentally, along with Hamilton also reprising his role from the stage play) in thoroughly annoying supporting roles. In Another Language they are both touching and endearing. Stella handles Jerry's crush with sensitivity, careful not to be the final weight that crushes him under the constant pressure of his family, and Jerry's attempts to verbalise his awkward fantasy of rescuing Stella while still being forced to observe the formalities a nephew must show towards his aunt is heartbreaking. The delicate balance is ultimately upset at a family party in a sublimely heart-wrenching scene halfway through the film in which Vicky and his mother push Stella and Jerry together to dance to Wedding of the Painted Doll. They dance, watched with ignorant calm by Vicky and the rest of the family, until evenutally Jerry is unable to hide his feelings towards Stella any longer. A subtle, touching and effective ensemble scene in which the entire cast are so believable as a family you forget for short spells that they're not. As much can be said for the rest of this forgotten gem of a film.

It's Been Awhile...

2011-12-16T01:02:00.001+01:00

Lee Tracy and Mae Clarke - a double screen debut

Just to get the ball rolling - I'm hoping to pick things up with this blog again. It's been awhile!

Assuming I do keep this up, this film may get mentioned a few times as one I'm dying to see. Big Time (1929) starring Lee Tracy and Mae Clarke. I know a print exists, but as yet have no idea where to find it. I've heard of screenings in Paris and a few places in the U.S., but have no idea if there is any way to get a copy of this for home viewing. My fingers are crossed that someday it will materialise - Lee Tracy's film debut. Wow.

Does anyone know where to find this film? Have you seen it?

An Ode to Tracy and Dvorak

2007-10-07T18:54:00.001+01:00

The Strange Love of Molly Louvain [1932] Dir. Michael Curtiz. Starring Ann Dvorak, Lee Tracy, Leslie Fenton, Richard Cromwell, Frank McHugh.

"Just one of the tinsel girls. Looks swell on a Christmas tree, but can't stand up in the rain."

There's a lot to like about The Strange Love of Molly Louvain, a certain unpolished charm that makes it my favourite of all those wonderful, cynical pre-code gems from a year in Hollywood filmmaking when the gods certainly seemed to come together. Warner Bros was cranking out threadbare melodramas like Louvain by the truckload in 1932, often with names much bigger than Lee Tracy and Ann Dvorak, but the electricity crackling between this movie's stars wasn't nearly as consistent in the studio's output. Their scenes together light up an otherwise drab and thoroughly cliched movie, which just goes to show you don't always need a Harlow, Stanwyck or Gable when you've got some great actors, zippy dialogue and a director who could do wonders on a Warners-sized budget.

Molly Louvain follows the usual boy meets girl, girl gets pregnant and runs out of town with local gangster and becomes a fugitive of the law plotline (that old chestnut). Dvorak plays Molly with the endearing, Olive Oyl gangliness that was her trademark, even after she bleaches her hair while on the run from the police. Scotty (Tracy) is a reporter living in the room next door in the faded old boarding house Molly uses as her hide out. One look at Molly and Scotty's got her number - she's a hard nut. He can read people, he 'knows women'.

'The boys call me Babe,' Molly says with a grin. 'I knew it, Babe or Queenie. I'm a reporter, I read between the sheets,' he grins back, - to which Dvorak quips, 'I used to read in bed myself.' Tracy does a double take and, impressed, offers some breakfast: bread, coffee, marmalade? 'Make it jam,' Dvorak purrs, and takes a puff of her cigarette.

Dvorak is an ideal partner for Tracy's wisecracks - she's no dope and, unlike most of Tracy's other co-stars, the joke's not on her. She's smarter than Harlow or Velez and no scolding schoolmarm like Mary Brian. She can knock back her drinks and give Tracy a good slap when he deserves it, but she's still a lady. Where did these girls go after the Code? Why did they all have to turn into simpering idiots who couldn't wait to get married?

Tracy, of course, is his usual manic self but this time with added sex appeal. If you're used to that Charlie Brown head from Bombshell or Dinner at Eight then you're in for a treat. Lee Tracy is not only at his rat-a-tat best, he's also a bit of a babe. He's got a blonde, boyish handsomeness that is mercifully minus the MGM-inflicted Brylcreem and eyebrow makeup. Tracy's legendary drinking habit would catch up with him soon enough in the looks department, so Louvain probably gives us a last glimpse of the actor really in his physical prime.
And just for those of you who like your heroes with a rebellious streak, Tracy and Dvorak both had this in spades. Tracy was already developing a reputation for liking a drink or three and failing to show up for work. Reports floated about hinting at drunken fisticuffs in speakeasies, and this was still two years before the infamous Viva Villa urinary malfunction that would relegate him to B pictures ever after. Dvorak was no better, though I would guess more sober. She married Louvain co-star Leslie Fenton (he played the gangster) and took a year-long honeymoon in Europe to celebrate. Fenton encouraged Dvorak's confrontations with the notoriously slave driving Warner Bros and the studio was none too happy about it. The actress went back to work, but only to squander her talent in so-so roles as "punishment" for a few more years until she finally broke free in 1936, then almost disappeared altogether by the end of the decade. Both Tracy and Dvorak would still be in work all the way into the TV age, but both experienced that bittersweet blessing of being thwarted in their prime. Though they both turned in good performances after the pre-code era, its those early 30's comedies and melodramas that we remember them for. And that's not a bad thing - who really wants to see Dvorak or Tracy purified and apple-pied like the rest of them by the late 1930s?

You can find two (admittedly bad quality) clips of Tracy and Dvorak's best scenes below. The first is the scene in which the two get acquainted and probably my favourite part of the film. Tracy dancing Dvorak around the room - absolutely perfect.

Molly Louvain Clip 1

In the second clip shows their somewhat brutal scene when they finally get together. You wouldn't see this after 1934...

Molly Louvain Clip 2

The Mysterious Island

2007-08-12T19:50:00.000+01:00

The Mysterious Island [1929] Dir. Lucien Hubbard. Starring Lionel Barrymore, Lloyd Hughes, Montagu Love, Jacqueline Gadsden.

I'm no connoisseur of classic sci-fi (heck, the only futuristic monster movies I've been able to sit through from start to finish were on Mystery Science Theater 3000), but the half-silent, half-talking MGM release The Mysterious Island had enough quirks, and absolutely beautiful deep sea cinematography, to keep me interested and really quite impressed. Why hadn't I heard of this one before?

Had Mysterious Island been a full on talkie, it might very well have made the MST3K grade. It meets just about all the criteria: logic-bending plot twists, an unconvinced cast turning in unconvincing performances, ridiculous monster suits, even stunts that border on cruelty to animal actors. The film visited the even then-antiquated Jules Verne story of the same name and the double whammy of 1920s nostalgia for Verne and today's nostalgia for early sound film make this either a double curiosity or double drudgery... depending on how far nostalgic novelty goes with you.

The aforementioned quirks were actually kinks that couldn't be ironed out of an infamously cursed production that would make a car accident look well planned. It seems today that the film is better remembered for its shambolic creation than for the actual finished product. MGM wanted to create for themselves a money-maker of The Lost World sort, but in the end saddled themselves with a two and a half-year, accident-prone nightmare that limped along just long enough to be perfectly timed for the added headache of the transition to sound. Hopes had been high in 1926; Thalberg had hired no less than Maurice Tourneur to direct the dramatic scenes and J. Ernest Williamson (a specialist in underwater cinematography who had worked on 1916's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) for the deep sea action to be filmed on location in the Caribbean. But as rewrites ruffled the artistic temperament of Tourneur until he was replaced first by Benjamin Christensen and then by more reliable studio director Lucien Hubbard, poor Williamson was taking one step forward and two steps back in a series of violent hurricanes, and with the talkies were ever more surely encroaching, the whole thing had to be re-rigged for sound. If you have a look at the poster above, MGM boast that the film took two years to shoot, trying to make a series of unfortunate screw ups look like it was all done on purpose. Audiences weren't fooled though, and Mysterious Island only picked up a tenth of it's costs at the box office. Apparently, it was this film that scared studios from attempting Verne's other work for years to come.

But don't let all that stop you. I for one liked it, for two reasons. The first was Lionel "there's a lot of ham in me" Barrymore. No matter how many times critics disparage his alleged scenery-chewing, I'll always enjoy a performance by the craggier of the two Barrymore brothers and he's saved more than one otherwise tedious production in my eyes. Spoken dialogue is only used occasionally in Mysterious Island which would be a shame except for the fact that it keeps Montagu Love mercifully silent for most of the scenes. But Barrymore is great as usual as Count Dakkar (read Captain Nemo) and Jacqueline Gadsden is interesting to watch as well. The second reason Mysterious Island is worth a gander is the beautiful scenery in the underwater scenes. Although I've read Williamson's work was mainly scrapped for action shots taken in a studio tank, that doesn't make the scenes any less effective. I'd just watched The Thief of Bagdad before catching this one, and the underwater shots of Mysterious Island hold up really nicely against the better remembered Douglas Fairbanks film. Why audiences would have been so uninterested in this spectacle I don't know. Surely the kids would have liked this one?

I found the full version of Mysterious Island after watching a shortened version of it on YouTube. Have a look but don't tell anyone, you never know how long it'll last before someone takes it down!

Watch The Mysterious Island

Doomsday (1928): Books into Film #2

2007-08-01T11:25:00.001+01:00

Doomsday [1928] Dir. Rowland V Lee. Starring Florence Vidor, Gary Cooper, Lawrence Grant, Charles A Stevenson.
It's certainly true that there's a film for every mood. Popcorn movies, date movies, weepies, nailbiters, laffers... you can add to that the type of movie best appreciated when your a sneezing, aching invalid with only will enough to lift your remote control finger. I found a great one of these just when I needed it: Paramount's 1928 melodrama Doomsday.

Gary Cooper as Arnold Furze

I watched this one in an empty flat on a rainy afternoon one day, sick with the cold. Knowing nothing about the film, but with interest piqued by the chance to see Florence Vidor and a young Gary Cooper, I was impressed by what turned out to be a quiet, brooding little film about a woman who betrays the man who has loved her but, when she realises her mistake, must work to redeem herself by slaving away for him on his beloved farm. Not a masterpiece by any means, but I enjoyed the film enough to find the book, enjoyed that, and thought it would make for a nice second installment of the Books into Film series...

Florence Vidor

A quick synopsis

Doomsday heroine Mary Viner (Vidor) is a girl fed up with her dreary life in post-1918, rural Sussex. She lives with her elderly parents in a little box of a house in "Cinder Town" just down the road from the Doomsday Farm, owned by ex-soldier and gentleman farmer Arnold Furze (Cooper). While Mary balks at the idea of being buried alive under the drudgery of domestic work (the '20s were roaring out there somewhere you know), Furze has an almost zealous enthusiasm for honest work and has his eye on making Mary, little grafter that she is, his wife and workmate.
Furze takes his beloved on a tour of his farm, her future home, but Mary bolts as she envisions a life of dullness worse than death and marries rich, unromantic Percival Fream instead. But after a few years of living the high life the loveless marriage is unendurable, and Mary goes back to her old house at Cinder Town to try to make peace with the old beau she abandoned. Mary has learned her lesson, and wants to know the satisfaction of a hard day's work again, but Furze doesn't want to risk humiliation a second time and rejects her attempts to revive their romance. The only way Mary can convince him she has changed is by stubbornly planting herself in his home and working for him as his housekeeper to show him that she's made of stronger stuff, and has learned humility and the value of work.

While neither Vidor nor Cooper's performance turned out to be overly impressive - not bad, but not really memorable - the production as a whole is wonderfully atmospheric, more than making up for any shortcomings. Director Rowland V Lee creates a moodily overcast little village with a faded, Olde English daintiness where inhabitants have nothing but the mending and peeping secretively at the neighbours to keep them busy (hence Lee's emphasis on the spying habits of old Fream in the screencaptures above). All this adds a nice weight to the sombre material this story deals with. The lengths to which Mary must go to redeem herself in the eyes of so serious a character as Furze are just shy of those taken to enter a convent, with an equally austere reward at the end. But Mary learns the old moral that champagne and parties are nice, but bread water and honest work are the only stuff of life that are truly fulfilling.

The Film Daily, 1928

There is actually very little information readily available today on this film, which gives the impression that this one's been largely forgotten. To be fair, 1928 was a real embarrassment of riches with The Wind, The Crowd, Show People, Four Sons, Lilac Time... the list seemed endless. Well, almost. Here's a copy of The Film Daily's top ten for the year, courtesy of All Movie Talk. Then as now, a quiet little film like Doomsday was buried under such heavyweights.

And here's a not unkind, but not ecstatic, review of the film:

PHOTOPLAY
April, 1928

At last Florence Vidor shakes off the great lady manner, the coy sophistication, the tea-and-toast comedy tricks. Miss Vidor emerges as an artist and proves that she has something real to give to the screen. In this fine, intelligent story, she plays a household drudge. Although she loves Arnold Furze, played by Gary Cooper, he can only offer her the further drudgery of a farmer's wife. So she marries a rich neighbor. And then comes the drama. Rowland V. Lee has made an absorbing picture. Women, especially, will like it because they will see in it their own problems, their own mistakes. And admirers of Miss Vidor who have seen her fading into a genteel feminine version of Adolphe Menjou, will be glad to know that being a star hasn't made her forget how to act.

Doomsday by Warwick Deeping

And for the book

You can read the book online, free, courtesy of Project Gutenburg.
Read Doomsday here

Doomsday was based on the Warwick Deeping novel of the same name, published in 1927 and fits my "Books into Film" criteria because, although the moral was considered romantic and old fashioned even upon its release, both the book and film are filled with great little details that set the story firmly in its era. The threat of "progress", the raising of aspirations in women, the threadbare gentility of the ex-servicemen, it's all there. This book won't change your life, like most of Deeping's work, but if you've never been to 1920s rural Sussex, it's still got something to offer and for the historical detail, I'd recommend it.

Deeping was a prolific and bestselling writer (68 works in total) and most famous for the First World War novel Sorrell and Son, published two years before Doomsday. A number of his books, including Sorrell, were made into films in the 1920s because the familiarity among audiences would guarantee a certain degree of box office, especially among women. Doomsday wouldn't have been at the top of Deeping's achievements, but it's a nice little tale that I might not have picked up, had I not been so taken by the film.

You can find out more about the writer at the link below. Biographical information, a list of works and reviews:

Warwick Deeping at Collection Books and Magazines

"A nation rabid for war"

2007-07-18T22:44:00.001+01:00

Here are a few pictures of Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks at a rally in New York, 1917, encouraging fans to buy Liberty Bonds and support the future of democracy. It's a great snapshot of the United States at the brink of entering World War and stepping into her 20th century boots as a major world power; and the likes of Chaplin, Fairbanks and the rest of the movie making industry helped to push that transition ever more quickly forward...

Chaplin and Fairbanks, 1917

Luckily for us today, Kevin Brownlow had the foresight to find these people, record their thoughts on what has now become and important moment in American political as well as cultural history, before it was too late. Certainly everyone in this documentary has since passed away - maybe with the exception of a few sons and daughters - so to hear the stories of war and propaganda making from the people who took part is all at once an invaluable historical resource a silent film buff's dream come true.
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Watch Hollywood Goes to War
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Kevin Brownlow

The war years marked a turning point in American society. It was a time of nation building when a wildly diverse and even more widely sprawled collection of immigrants and old pioneers came together to "make the world safe for democracy." In 1917, that meant knocking down the German "Hun". To get the patriotic, pro-war fires burning in a largely pacifist, disinterested, heck - German - nation, the propaganda mill began to turn. The CPI, lead by journalist George Creel, was thus created to turn the American public into "one white-hot mass... with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination." One method the CPI used to achieve this was with the Four Minute Men, so named because that was the amount of time allowed these pro-involvement public speakers while the projectionist was changing reels in the ever increasing number of movie theatres across the country. Plus the name had the added punch of patriotic recognition of the days of the Revolution.

Historian David Kennedy wrote in Over There: The First World War and American Society:

“By the beginning of 1918, the Four-Minute Men were specifically encouraged to use atrocity stories. The Committee, which early in the war had produced upbeat films like Pershing’s Crusaders and Our Colored Fighters, turned to promoting movies like The Prussian Cur, and The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin. And in a development chillingly evocative of the “Two Minutes Hate” exercise practised by George Orwell’s Oceanians in his novel, 1984, the CPI urged participatory “Four-Minute Singing” to keep patriotism at “white heat.”

George Creel

It worked well and, even more significantly, helped to get an early Hollywood eager for respectability on the bandwagon. An industry with its fair share of prominent Central European names attached to it, plenty saw an opportunity to save their interests (Laemmle, Zukor, etc.) and make a few bucks as well as a name for themselves. Erich von Stroheim earned notoriety as "The Man You Love to Hate" and frequently aroused aggressive reactions from moviegoers appalled by his onscreen brutality. There's a great interview in the video with von Stroheim's wife Valerie, who told Brownlow:

"We went to a little theatre out on North Broadway, and I see him on the screen, and he's shooting an apple off an old lady's head. Then he shoots her. And so I said, "We'd better get out of the theatre before the lights are turned on."

At the same time, the push for preparedness was hitting those in the film colony. In Hollywood, Cecil B. DeMille did his bit by heading the Lasky Home Guard on Thursday nights, kitted out in costume-department uniforms and prop rifles. Niece Agnes DeMille told Brownlow:

Von Stroheim

“They drilled very faithfully and then they had a final drill out at the Lasky ranch and some of the men went to France… When he said goodbye to the boys, Cecil’s voice broke and he was really overcome with it. Mary [Pickford], however, like a little soldier, stood up and sent them to their death very valiantly. The grisly part is that some did go to their death.”

But not everyone was enjoying the solemn patriotism of 1917-18. The documentary includes a chilling comment from Intolerance cameraman Karl Brown when he explained the failure of D. W. Griffith’s 1916 epic:

“What he did not realize was that in the 18 months that he was making that picture America, from being a pacifist nation whose popular song was ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier [to Kill Some Other Darling Mother’s Boy]’ had turned to “Hate the Hun”. Meanwhile Griffith was preaching peace on Earth and good will to man [with Intolerance]; how could such a sermon do anything but fail in a nation that is rabid for war?”

But by the time the war began to wrap up in the autumn of 1918, President Wilson was worrying that the anti-Hun, atrocity-ridden propaganda had worked too well, and the degree of anti-German sentiment whipped up in the previous year would make the forthcoming peace process difficult. As November approached, the government let it be known that it was time to nix the Hun pictures.

Actress Blanche Sweet remembered: “When we received this letter saying ‘cut down on the German atrocities’ we knew the war was over.” Brownlow asked her if she realized the films that became known as ‘atrocity pictures’ were exaggerations. Sweet replied:

“We didn’t exaggerate the atrocities. They were there. They were in the newspapers. Or are you saying newspapers exaggerated them? I don’t know – who are you going to go by? Who’s going to tell you what’s exaggerated and what isn’t? What other way have you?”

This is of course only a tiny portion of the whole story, so here are a few links if you're interested:

Mobilizing Public Support for War: An Analysis of American Propaganda During World War
an excellent, scholarly essay by Robert A. Wells from the 2002 International Studies Convention.

The Reckless Art of Erich von Stroheim
by the ever-informative (and entertaining) Tom Sutpen at Bright Lights Film Journal on the ultimate Beast of Berlin.

The Bond
the 1918 Charlie Chaplin short encouraging Americans to buy war bonds.

Garbo the sailor-woman

2007-07-15T19:49:00.000+01:00

Some gorgeous photos from Greta Garbo's Anna Christie 1930.

Mean, moody and magnificent...

2007-07-02T20:45:00.000+01:00

Dragonwyck (1946) Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Starring Gene Tierney (Miranda), Walter Huston (Ephraim Wells), Vincent Price (Nicholas Van Ryn), Glenn Langan (Dr Turner), Anne Revere (Abigail Wells).

"You must never be afraid of anything with me Miranda..."

I first thought to review Dragonwyck as the second instalment of the ‘Books into Film’ series but, after inspecting the book, decided against the idea. Dragonwyck is by no means a dumb Mills and Boon bodice-ripper, but nor does it make any thought provoking statement on place or time or society worth examining. Joe Mankiewicz described the worth of the plot for his debut as a writer-director pretty accurately, saying that

‘…the love story is apt to be very unsatisfying in its conclusion. The young doctor cannot be half so glamorous or exciting as his murderous heel rival. I can imagine no woman preferring the hero to the villain, in this case, for either bed or breakfast…The political and economic applications are naïve, oversimple, and made unexciting by the times in which we live.’

What is exciting of course is Vincent Price. Top-billed Gene Tierney is good as the religious farmgirl Miranda who falls under the spell of her sexy psycho cousin, but the role is a largely thankless one, overshadowed by the obsessive cruelty of Price's Nicholas Van Ryn. Tierney wrote years later that she disliked the film and her performance in it (or was it really the distraction of her deteriorating relationship with Oleg Cassini and her frustrated one with JFK at the time?) The historical setting in 1840s New York is a treat and the camera work and score are haunting, but without Price the whole thing would've fallen a bit flat. As the dashing, cold hearted descendent of an old Dutch family with a curse on its bloodline, its Price who propels the story and gets all the best lines:

"What can you possibly do up there?" Mrs Van Ryn asks. "Possibly?" Nicholas challenges, "Anything from pinning butterflies to hiding an insane twin brother. Actually, I read. I hope that my explanation satisfies you?"

With a voice like that at your disposal, it'd be a shame to waste them on anyone else...

To be honest I never realized what a babe Price was in his younger days; I like most people remember him as the weak-willed Shelby in Laura, or as the king of schlock horror from innumerable monster flicks of the 60s. Tall and moody with sad blue eyes, and even more handsome when he's crazy, it's hard to take your eyes off him. Critics in 1946 seemed to be equally taken:

Look magazine swooned that Price was “lean, razor-jawed and romantic.” In fact Price had to lose 30 pounds of his 205 pound heft (the guy was 6 foot 4, so it wasn’t that bad) after he had padded out for an earlier role in Keys of the Kingdom. At first Mankiewicz wasn't convinced, but Price wanted the role badly. "I had to fight like the devil for this part," Vince later wrote. "My bosses kept remembering me as the good-natured guy in Laura and I insisted I wasn't that type." But the new slimline figure seemed to tip the scales, so to speak, as Look noted,

“As Dragonwyck’s homicidal aristocrat who tries to murder two wives, he sets a romantic pace which will be a revelation to feminine moviegoers. One of Hollywood’s soundest actors, this soft-spoken former member of St. Louis society dominates the picture.”

Louella Parsons agreed:

"[Price] has reached the pinnacle of his success. His Nicholas Van Ryn...is his top performance. It is an extremely difficult role because the man is a charmer, even though he is a snobbish rogue. Also, he is a case for a psychiatrist. The role of Van Ryn calls for a lot of acting and Vincent admits he's a ham and loves to act all over the place, but the fact that he has restrained himself and doesn't over-emote is a tribute to his ability."

Dragonwyck probably marks the height of Price's pre-horror career in that it was at this time that he was considered most seriously as a possible romantic leading man. Neither he nor the studios ever really followed through on this, but he was probably better off for that. No studio-produced personality, Price had too much going on upstairs to ever get too absorbed in becoming a romantic idol. Plus, the cards didn't play out that way with Fox or indeed with Universal. Instead he made a new name for himself in horror movies with House of Wax in 1953 and was a busy working actor and cult icon for the next four decades. Well-rounded, Price's interests in fine art, writing and gourmet cooking prompted many to pin on him the label "renaissance man", and never one to take himself too seriously, Price was by all accounts one of the best loved men in the business.

A lifelong friend of Boris Karloff, Janet Gaynor, and an early inspiration to Greg Peck, he charmed Garbo with his knowledge of bread-making. Columnist Inez Wallace wrote:

"I really have a crush on that St. Bernard, with that courtly manner and that doggone smile of his which is like the sun breaking through the clouds. Of all the actors I know, Vincent Price is the only one about whom one never hears an unkind word."

And to end with a link: The Vincent Price Exhibit is an excellent online tribute, from which I pulled some of these great photos, and I'd recommend it if you too might be getting a hankering for all things Vincent. A collection of photos and memorabillia from a longtime fan in New York, it's one of the truly unique movie star sites with something original worth sharing. Price certainly deserves it.

The Vincent Price Exhibit

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Cagney and Blondell

2007-06-29T07:47:00.000+01:00

I always like photos like these, the ones where it's quite palpable that something big is just about to happen...
In the case of these shots, from the Broadway play Penny Arcade at the Fulton Theatre, 1930, a young James Cagney and Joan Blondell are on the brink fame. Although Penny Arcade didn't last long, 24 performances if my sources are correct, it was enough to get the pair noticed by Al Jolson, who snapped up the rights to the story and sold them to Warner Bros. Supposedly Jolson insisted that Cagney and Blondell re-create their roles for the film version, Sinner's Holiday.

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Mantrap (1926): Books into Film #1

2007-06-24T16:35:00.001+01:00

Mantrap (1926) Dir. Victor Fleming. Starring Clara Bow, Percy Marmont, Ernest Torrence, Eugene Pallette.
I’ve started this unofficial 'Books into Film' series with the film adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ Mantrap, published and filmed in 1926 because although the book and film are quite different in theme and plot, they are equally enjoyable stories in their own way and appreciation of one still leads to appreciation of the other ...and Clara Bow is in one of them ...and I’m from Minnesota and will always have a soft spot for Sinclair Lewis.

A quick synopsis:
Mantrap follows Ralph Prescott, a New York lawyer on the verge of a nervous breakdown, whose friend Woodbury suggests he join him on a he-man, ego-boosting camping trip to Canada. Quickly growing tired of Woodbury's petty, bossy ways, Ralph is desperate for an exit and finds a saviour in Joe Easter, a kindly and philosophical backwoodsman who invites him back to his cabin at Mantrap. There Ralph meets Joe’s pretty young wife, Alverna.
Alverna is a lively young girl from Minneapolis, who livens up her existence in the North Woods by teasing Joe, drinking gin, and throwing parties for the local backwoodsman. Despite Ralph's best efforts to resist for loyalty to his friendship with Joe, Alverna woos him into taking her back to New York with him and the two go on the run with Joe on their trail…

The fundemental differences between the book and the film are apparent from the start. In the book Ralph is running away from New York and his claustrophobic lifestyle. He’s keen to breathe fresh air in open spaces, he wants to feel like a man. And it’s this emphasis on the wilderness and masculinity that makes the male relationships of the book, namely that between Ralph and Joe, so important. Today the book is usually considered for its interpretation of "the wilderness" and male bonding and what it meant to the newly urbanised "typical American man". Alverna is almost a secondary character, whose purpose is to test Ralph and Joe’s friendship.

In the film, Ralph (Percy Marmont) leaves New York jaded by the manipulative women he deals with as a divorce lawyer. He's running away from women, and when he finds Alverna (Clara Bow) he is bowled over by her vitality and unaffected vivacity. His friendship with Joe (Ernest Torrence) is still important, but when Clara Bow is in the room everything else usually fades into the background anyway and it's the relationship between Ralph and Alverna that becomes important. Joe plays a much smaller role in the film, which is a shame. But then it might have been hard for a silent film to show the deep friendship between two men without it coming across in ways other than intended. (Flesh and the Devil comes to mind) Hey, you have to mime these things, easier expressed in sound. (Mantrap was made later into a film called Untamed with Ray Milland in 1940 by the way.)

I've read Sinclair Lewis enjoyed having his work put on film, which somehow seems out of character for a writer so famous for his criticism of American homogenization. In the case of Mantrap they even tacked on a ludicrous happy ending. But he, at the very least, must have enjoyed the income and Lewis had an impressive number of his books turned into quite nice little earners onscreen. Main Street was made twice in just over ten years, once with Florence Vidor and Monte Blue in 1923 and once as the stupidly-named I Married a Doctor with Pat O'Brien and Josephine Hutchinson in 1936; Babbitt was made twice, including once in 1934 with Guy Kibbee as the title character; Walter Huston as Dodsworth , Ronald Colman as Arrowsmith, Spencer Tracy as Cass Timberlane, Irene Dunne as Ann Vickers, Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry and many others less familiar. Lewis certainly surpassed contemporary and fellow Minnesotan F Scott Fitzgerald in the number of film adaptations of his work and only W. Somerset Maugham comes immediately to mind as a writer whose work, not originally intended for the screen, has been visited so many times.

Sinclair Lewis in Minnesota, 1915.

In defense of The Front Page (1931)

2007-05-15T07:25:00.001+01:00

After reading a rather dismissive review of the 1931 film version of The Front Page, in which the reviewer was so pre-occupied with the (admittedly) bad sound quality and politically-incorrect banter that he advised the reader to skip right ahead to 1940's His Girl Friday, I thought it might be worth pointing out all the reasons not to skip the original pre-code classic, warts and all.

Crude and technically inferior, The Front Page is still as close as we'll ever get today to the raucous 1928 run of the original Broadway play on which the film is based, and for that it's worth every minute. His Girl Friday is an alright film in its own right but, other than a few names and the rolltop desk, it has little to do with the play and frankly suffers from a lack of, well, cohones. And those cohones are the reason The Front Page was such a great story in the first place. One might blame Rosalind Russell for sapping all the masculine coarseness out of the original story, but I'd have to say it's really down to Cary Grant. He's just too smooth, too polished, too Cary Grant, to be the kind of reporter I want to see onscreen. I much prefer the pot-bellied character actors, dirty pressroom and the as-close-as-you-can-get "That son-of-a-bitch stole my watch!" of the original pre-code Front Page. To skip it would be to miss out on the chance to get acquainted with one of the most celebrated of American comedies.

________________________

On the search for Lee Tracy memorabilia, I stumbled across this great little read, The Front Page: From Theater to Reality, by George W. Hilton, and it's a history/movie buff's dream. I'll admit I was initially drawn to the book out of the less academic excitement of finding a young Lee Tracy on the cover, but it took but two lines of the first paragraph to realize that this book had a whole lot more to offer. In From Theater to Reality, Hilton outlines not just the original play's production, casting and first run, he actually goes back to 1920s Chicago to trace the real life people on which the play's writers, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, based their characters and plot. With such a rich backstory, this old chestnut of a newspaper comedy comes brilliantly to life.

Hecht and MacArthur, both former crime reporters in Chicago, joined forces in New York in 1925 where they formed the close working relationship that would make them famous. In New York Hecht was nostalgic for the old newspaper days and began to talk about a play that would celebrate the excitement and camaraderie of the profession. Though principle character Hildy Johnson was based on one of MacArthur's colleagues (John Hilding Johnson of the Chicago Herald and Examiner), the plot would be based on a practical joke played on MacArthur by his old editor Walter Howey (read Walter Burns and the arrest on the train to New York) and a sensational story of an escaped convict that both Hecht and MacArthur covered in 1921.

At the centre of the story is the corruption and incompetence of the Chicago Mayer and Sheriff Hartman as they try to use the execution of an anarchist who murdered a black policeman in a bid to win election votes. And here's where the history comes in: the anarchist prison escapee of the play, Earl Williams, was based on real life criminal Tommy O'Connor who staged an equally fantastic escape from prison, making the Chicago police the laughingstock of the city. Hecht and MacArthur linked this police cock-up with the infamous corruption of Chicago Mayor William Hale Thompson, whom many newspapers had openly accused of working with Al Capone. Add to that the gallery of hard-bitten reporters who appeared in the play with name changes barely more than the transposing of two letters from the originals, and you get a real flavour of just what it was Hecht was so nostalgic for. So in 1928, when The Front Page went on-stage with the help of wizkid producer Jed Harris and writer/director George Kaufman to create a "better, tighter and funnier script", the show hit the road with the aforementioned Tracy as Hildy and Osgood Perkins (Scarface's Johnny Lovo) as Walter Burns.

The "tight and funny" script also revelled in some unbelieveably salty language. Audiences gasped when Hildy sighs to Burns "You've just bitched up my whole life!" The number of "goddamn's", "bastard's" and the like were a point where critics split (and made the play near impossible to produce in Britain for years), but on the story they were unanimous in praise. One New York reviewer compared the play to a Shakespearean comedy: "If the dome-headed old gentleman of Avon...ever cooked up a more effective hash of dramatic action, it is buried in the ruins of the Globe..."

The best part of From Theater to Reality is the account of the play's opening in Chicago. Hilton writes: "Of the thousands of people who have seen The Front Page over the course of the twentieth century, I suspect that those who enjoyed it most were the audience at its opening in Chicago at the Erlanger Theatre on Nov. 25, 1928." Accounts of the opening night audience don't disappoint. Jed Harris remembered: "They all turned up on the first night in Chicago and simply wallowed in delight. [The ovation at the end of Act I] sounded like the roar of a herd of wild animals panicked by fire at the zoo." A city seeing itself onstage; everyday people experiencing the shock of recognition as they realise they're watching themselves in a hit play. It makes your toes curl with envy - to be there that night!

And as for the film...

With all the colourful language (and off-colour humour), slobby reporters, prostitutes, criminals and corrupt politicians (phew!) there was but a tiny window of opportunity in which to make a movie version of The Front Page and still keep the basic flavour of the script and sense of time and place. Howard Hughes took up the project and Lewis Milestone directed a script as near to the original as they could and peopled the production with a great cast. Why they didn't use Perkins and Tracy I don't know, although I've read that Hughes was encouraged to use Jimmy Cagney but didn't want to put a "little runt" like him in his movie. But as Broadway actors migrated West there were plenty of others to choose from. The Front Page's newsroom is like a who's who of unmistakable faces, or at least voices, that inhabited comedies throughout the 30s: Walter Catlett, Frank McHugh, Edward Everett Horton... The leads were equally suited to playing in an ensemble cast: Pat O'Brien, Adolphe Menjou and Mary Brian - all more in the vein of character actors or secondary leads than overpowering, conspicuous stars. Great casting that really let the story shine through.

Some of the humour is racist, sexist and bigoted to 21st century ears, but this was 1931. The social rules were different. It reflects the politics, and social etiquette, of the time. Derisive references to "the coloured vote" and city politicians vying for it were familiar to audiences - especially in Chicago; which is why, though I wouldn't defend pickaninny jokes as high comedy, they firmly plant this film in a recognizable time and place in history that the glossy, apolitical His Girl Friday completely lacks. I guess in the end it all depends on what you want to watch - Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell's verbal sparring - or a morally murky story about 1920s Chicago. In the case of The Front Page vs His Girl Friday, I'd take the original any day.

The 1931 film adaptation of The Front Page won rave reviews upon release as well as three Academy Award Nominations for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor (Menjou) for that year.

And now for some links! With one click on the link below, you can compare the two films for yourself at Movieflix, for free!

The Front Page/His Girl Friday

Plus, for an added treat (though this might be debatable) you can hear Walter Winchell, that other newsie icon, in the Lux Radio Theater version of the play that broadcasted in 1937 at the Internet Archive.
The Front Page - The Lux Radio Hour
And one more nice link. In 1922 Ben Hecht published a collection of his 1910s-20s Chicago Daily News columns in book form. A great read and a great way to get a flavour of Chicago in the jazz age.
1001 Afternoons in Chicago

Colonel Blimp vs Winston Churchill and the MoI

2007-05-12T13:28:00.000+01:00

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp [1943] Dir. Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger. Starring Roger Livesey, Anton Walbrook and Deborah Kerr.

To continue the British Cinema theme, I thought I’d highlight one of the most interesting backstories of any film of the WWII era: that of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

It’s been long known that the Winston Churchill opposed to the production of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in 1942, but it wasn’t until the late 1970s when film historian Ian Christie came across what has now come to be known as ‘The Blimp Files’ in the Public Records Office in London, that just who wanted the film stopped and what lengths they were willing to go to to do it finally came to light.

The character Colonel Blimp actually originated as a comic strip character (they made comic-inspired movies even then!) created in 1934 for London’s Evening Standard. Cartoonist David Low found inspiration for his iconic caricature of Old Britain’s self-satisfaction and incompetence while observing the fat, privileged men who frequented a local Turkish bath. Blimp, with his ridiculously round figure, walrus moustache and perpetual towel around the waist, represented the element of British government and society in the 1930s that was pompous, reactionary and out of step with the times.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger seized this idea. Powell explained, “Colonel Blimp was a symbol of British procrastination and British regard for tradition and all things which we knew were losing the war.” The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is a film about the changing face and changing needs of Britain, of an older generation that needed to make way for the younger because, as Powell hinted, the fate of the nation was at stake.

But with this questioning of the Britain’s approach to the war, featuring a character whose name had entered the nation’s language as an insulting euphemism for bumbling incompetence, came opposition from the Government - not least from Minister of War, Sir James Grigg. It was Grigg who took most exception to a film highlighting the dangers of ‘blimpery’, of which he himself had been frequently accused of in the depressing days of 1942. Grigg’s appeals to brand the film as ‘negative propaganda’, both to the Ministry of Information as well as direct to the Prime Minister, were taken seriously and Churchill hinted to MoI head Brendan Bracken that he’d push to extend his department’s censorship powers in order to block Blimp’s release. Powell remembered:

“…we ran into trouble with the M of I who read the script and said they thought it was defeatist – they never did appreciate the fact that as an artist or storyteller you have to show what's bad before you can show what's good. You can't go out saying we're bound to be alright because we're British. You've got to show the bad bits first. Propagandists never do. They said: ‘We don't think you should make this film’. [We said]: ‘Go and fuck yourself!’ They said: ‘All right. But you can't have Laurence Olivier’. ‘You're going to stop us making it?’ ‘Oh no, we're not going to stop you, after all this is a democracy. But we advise you not to make it and you can't have Laurence Olivier because he's in the Fleet Air Arm and we're not going to release him to play your Colonel Blimp’. So we came out of the M of I and Emeric said to me ‘What shall we do?’ and I said: ‘We’ll play Roger Livesey’.”

Roger Livesey was a Welsh actor who’d made a name for himself more on the stage than onscreen (although his film career before Blimp did include a 1923 film version of the ultra-controversial Marie Stopes study on female sexuality, Married Love) and Powell expressed some disappointment in having to settle on this second choice. He wanted Olivier and, perhaps rightly, believed that only he could have added the necessary bite to the role, making the obsolete-ness of Blimp clear and easy to reject. Played by Livesey, with his softer good looks and gently husky voice, the character of Clive Candy (Blimp) becomes more sympathetic. While Livesey's Blimp grows increasingly out-of-touch, he’s still touchingly sincere in his convictions and the abandonment of the era he represents becomes more cruel and heartless than it might have had Blimp been played more harshly hypocritical, more dangerously deluded. Powell said:

“The only change was that instead of having a vicious, slashing, cruel, merciless Colonel Blimp we had a dear old bumbler and of course everybody loved that.”

So in a way the MoI had succeeded - not in ruining the film or even hurting the quality of the production, they just took some of the harshness out of its criticism. But then again, would a slashing, merciless Blimp have been a welcome depiction in 1943, when Churchill and his government were beginning to win the war? This was my introduction to Livesey as an actor and, even if he wasn’t what Powell and Pressburger had in mind, he certainly doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of this film today. I guess I would have been one of those members of the audience back in 1943 who would have felt at the very least protective of this old man lost in a New Britain.

As he was the least well known of the three leads, Livesey was billed third. Above him were talented Austrian character actor Anton Walbrook, who was actually the biggest star in Blimp and got top billing, and Deborah Kerr who had yet to attain Hollywood fame but who had made a strong impression in British films including the controversial Love on the Dole two years earlier. Kerr is wonderful in the three symbolic female roles she plays: three different young women who represented very different things at various stages in Blimp's life. Walbrook also turns in a touching performance and was becoming a Powell favourite, featured in 49th Parallel in 1941 and The Red Shoes in 1948. Livesey, too, would follow this initial Powell-Pressburger collaboration with I Know Where I'm Going! in 1945 and the stunning A Matter of Life and Death in 1946.

Much of the information in this post came from The Powell & Pressburger Pages which hold some great, even academic, essays on their film catalogue. For a real in depth analysis on Churchill's opposition to Colonel Blimp see:

'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp' reconsidered, by James Chapman

Intensely researched and thoroughly annotated, Chapman's article offers real insight into the reasons Churchill wanted the film banned as well as some clarification on the often considerable variations in Michael Powell's memories of Blimp's production. Webmaster Steve Crook has really done movie fans a favour with this highly informative, as well as highly affectionate, website on this legendary movie-making team.

Stars in Transit

2007-04-15T08:14:00.000+01:00

The Library of Congress has a great, viewable archive called American Memory that holds, among many other things, a wealth of candid photos of the early silent stars courtesy of the Chicago Daily News. While the photos mainly revolve around arriving in and leaving Chicago, they're a treat not only for the early film star poses, but for the historic details in the backgrounds - 1920s trains, cars, fans, etc. Here are a few highlights...

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Wallace Reid, 1921.

Mae Murray, 1925.

Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, 1920.

Theda Bara, Norma Talmadge, 1926.

Gloria Swanson and husband, the Marquis de La Courdraye de La Falaise, 1925.

Harold Lloyd, wife Mildred Davis and daughter, 1927.

Rod La Rocque and wife, 1928.

Lionel Barrymore and fans, 1928.

Douglas Fairbanks, Ma Pickford, Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, 1918.

Karen Morley, Communism and Our Daily Bread

2007-04-09T12:42:00.001+01:00

Chances are you’ve come across King Vidor’s final instalment of his ‘war, wheat, and steel’ (though not in that order) trilogy, Our Daily Bread (1934), in some high school history class, or maybe playing at some college campus screening or other likely revival house. Daily Bread follows young-marrieds John and Mary Sims, the central characters of 1928's The Crowd, as a sort of sequel to the story of their early years of marriage in the city through to John's unemployment and flirtation with communal living during the dark days of the Depression. The final product is a Film and Society 101 lecturer’s dream: social commentary, radical politics, American history and a backstory even more interesting than the Depression-era tale itself. As it turned out, it wouldn't be King Vidor, but actress Karen Morley who would suffer most for her art.

Watch Our Daily Bread (1934) for free at Movieflix.
Our Daily Bread

By 1934, director King Vidor had earned the right to more creative freedom than most at MGM. With a string of profitable and prestigious films under his belt and the triumph of his gamble with The Big Parade (1925), Vidor had earned himself the chance to make the decidedly more un-commercial The Crowd three years later, and tried to push the envelope even further with Our Daily Bread.

Morley in Our Daily Bread

But even Vidor’s track record wasn’t enough to sell the film to staunch conservative Louis B. Mayer, a political activist himself. It was Mayer who, with the help of Irving Thalberg, had sabotaged Upton Sinclair's run for governor of California in 1934 by producing phoney newsreel footage of welfare-seeking hoboes flocking to California to cash in on Sinclair’s proposed socialist policies. With Mayer's political loyalties, there was no way he would fund a flagrantly un-commercial, leftist propaganda picture like Our Daily Bread. Vidor’s project was as quickly rejected by the other major studios as it had been by MGM and even the banks wouldn’t lend him the money he needed, forcing the director to mortgage his own house to finance the film. But Vidor’s commitment earned a sympathetic patron in Charlie Chaplin, whose enthusiastic endorsement ensured its United Artists release. It would be a collaboration that would come back to haunt Chaplin years later, contributing to the dossier J. Edgar Hoover put together to keep him and his supposedly Communist beliefs out of the country in 1952.

At first Vidor wanted James Murray, the unknown he had starred as John Sims in The Crowd, to reprise the role but the actor turned him down. Vidor remembered:

King Vidor

‘It was a love-hate relationship. Even though I discovered him when he was an extra, he wanted to prove that I didn’t own him...Years later, I ran into him when he was mooching money for a cup of coffee. I bought him a meal and a drink and told him I would put him in Our Daily Bread, but that he would have to reduce, to lay off the beer. He stood up, cursed me, and walked off. I never saw him again.’

With Murray out, Vidor had to settle on the alright Tom Keene for the role of John but got lucky with his new Mary, played by Karen Morley. It was Morley who would create the heart and soul of Our Daily Bread; her beautiful yet strangely ‘American Gothic’ looks and subtle performance give just the right amount of quiet steeliness Keene’s boyish, over-excited performance needs to keep the couple believable.

Before stardom beckoned in 1931, Morley had gone so far as to embark on a degree in medicine at UCLA before the acting bug bit, and its this extensive education that explains a lot about this actress. No feminine caricature or glamorous studio creation, Morley was and still is an odd presence in an era of ultra-groomed stars with over-polished accents or hardboiled dames with bleached blonde permanent waves. She was one of those women too smart, too well spoken to ever say “ain’t” believably. As an MGM contract player the actress had a variety of roles sent her way (Mata Hari, Arsene Lupin, The Mask of Fu Manchu), and although she tried to tiptoe around the most stupid and degrading, she admitted, ‘I mostly did what they gave me. I was glad to have the work.’

But when Morley married director Charles Vidor and announced she was going to start a family, MGM terminated her contract (after all, actresses may get pregnant, but they don’t have children!) and she went freelance in 1934. It was under these circumstances that King Vidor approached Morley for the role of Mary Sims in his ambitious film about the early 1930s ‘back to the land’ movement in Our Daily Bread.

Morley with Paul Muni in Black Fury

Making a film about the merits of communal of living might have seemed relatively harmless in 1934; the question of capitalism's viability was on many people's lips. Daily Bread even made a modest profit and according to Morley, the film ‘made me popular in the Soviet Union; King was amused by that.’ But the actress followed it up with Black Fury, a film about workers’ rights co-starring Paul Muni, and her commitment to left leaning political activism was set in motion. Morley divorced Vidor and married actor Lloyd Gough, and while Gough was in the army stationed in North Carolina during the war, Morley turned her attention to the organization of the local tobacco workers. When the couple returned to Hollywood after the war, Morley used her experience to organize union activism in Hollywood with the Screen Actors Guild.

Morley remembered in 1999:

‘The Actors Guild had been held to a 10-year no-strike agreement, and when that 10 were up, the progressives in the Screen Actors Guild made all these forward-looking proposals, most of them written on my dining-room table. I was blacklisted because of this activity, so I’m not a typical anything. From that time on, I always had the studios on my neck.’

Morley in 1951

In 1947 Robert Taylor and Sterling Hayden named Morley as a Communist to the HUAC and by 1951, when she pleaded the Fifth when asked if she was a member of the American Communist League, her career as an actress was finished.

Listen to a clip from the PBS documentary
The Legacy of the Hollywood Blacklist
in which Robert Taylor names Morley at the HUAC hearings.
Read the transcript here.

Morley would stay with Gough until his death in 1984, proceed to run (unsuccessfully) for lieutenant governor of New York in 1954 on the American Labor Party ticket, and make appearances and give interviews about her career and now (at least slightly) more accepted politics. I found one great interview, from 1999, in which Morley was every bit the smart, unpretentious, level headed woman she appeared to be on screen. Although she openly talked about her experiences during the hearings of the 40s and 50s, it's a shame she never put her entire life on paper. It would have made for one interesting, not to mention perceptive, take on American life and politics that didn't always make the history books.

Read Michael Sragow’s interview
Karen Morley: After All These Blacklisted Years
courtesy of The Village Voice.

Camile (1921)

2007-03-31T15:16:00.001+01:00

I recently re-watched the 1921 Alla Nazimova-Rudolph Valentino version of Camille (you can find it pretty easily either on the Greta Garbo edition’s DVD or via vidiLife nowadays). I always knew I should get around to watching this one again but a person has to be in the right mood for Nazimova. This actress's avant-garde dramatics aren't your typical popcorn-and-sofa style entertainment. (If Camille doesn't convince you just have a look at 1923's Salome) I’d given this film a try as a teenager but couldn’t really get through it in one sitting because, to be honest, Nazimova creeped me out and her bizarre mannerisms are only intensified by the medium of silent film: they create an effect intended for tastes more open and mature than mine were at 16. But I'm glad I did re-visit Camille, it made me have a closer look at what a fascinating eccentric Nazimova was in real life.

There's a great site on the net about the actress’s infamous mansion-turned-hotel-as-hotbed-of-Hollywood-scandal, The Garden of Allah. Nazimova was the first of the American cinema’s lesbian stars to hold a ‘court’ in Hollywood and had links with Mercedes de Acosta, the Spanish-American writer infamous for her affairs with such European actresses in Hollywood as Garbo, Negri and Dietrich. Nazimova hosted Hollywood parties with guest lists peppered with legendary names like Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson and Eleanora Duse with writers, dancers, singers and royal titles intermingled. The swimming pool, shaped like the Black Sea with underwater lights that must have been quite a kinky novelty in the early 1920s, was a major attraction. At the same time, The Garden was the backdrop for Nazimova’s lesbian relationships with several women who would be key figures in the short life of her Camille co-star Rudolph Valentino: June Mathis, Jean Acker and Natacha Rambova.

Mathis, who as head of Metro’s script department had used her influence to get Valentino his breakthrough role in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, wrote the film version of Camille and the film showcases Nazimova’s talents quite well: she’s totally compelling in both mannerism and appearance and has the eerie quality of a china doll come to life against the Art Nouveau sets designed by Rambova. Valentino, whom Nazimova had only just forgiven for marrying her ex-girlfriend actress Jean Acker, has little to do other than look at Nazimova with an alternately adoring or concerned expression as she goes through her transformations. Even in the end, when Marguerite is on her deathbed, Valentino’s character is so peripheral that he is left out of the big finale except in fuzzy memory sequences. December 1921’s Motion Picture Classic noted:

‘We understand that Mme. Nazimova constructed two conclusions to "Camille": one in which she follows the original novel in that the heroine dies alone, and the other in which she follows the play, wherein the lady of the camellias dies, for the sake of dramatic effectiveness, in the arms of the sorrowing Armand. We had the opportunity of viewing only the former, which, we must admit, has not the emotional wrench of the speaking play's climax...’
"Camille" is very nearly a series of close-ups of the star. The flashes of Rudolph Valentino as Armand indicate further promise in this highly promising young actor, but the remainder of the cast is wholly out of the atmosphere.’

Poor Valentino, 18 years Nazimova's junior and caught in the midst of a devoted circle Dorothy Arzner once described as 'a script Nazimova herself had written. We were all just supporting players.' Running in such circles its no wonder the actor was abused by the women in his life.

Valentino had met Natacha Rambova on the set of Uncharted Seas (1921) and by the time of Camille’s production Rudy had fallen in love and the two married in May 1922. The actor had only recently obtained a divorce from Jean Acker in Mexico, but didn’t realise he had to wait a year before he could remarry, and was promptly charged with bigamy and made a keen enemy of Acker.

Kevin Brownlow interviewed Four Horsemen cameraman Paul Ivano for his documentary series and accompanying book Hollywood: The Pioneers about his time as room mate to the Valentinos in which he relates a great little story:

‘Natacha, Rudy and cameraman Paul Ivano lived in a house on Sunset Boulevard while Jean Acker was trying to get proof that Rudy was unlawfully cohabitating in the State of California. During this potentially dangerous situation, Natacha asked Ivano to buy her a mountain lion cub. He did so, but they found the animal only took to Ivano, and insisted on sleeping on his bed. “Even little mountain lions get bigger,” said Ivano, “and in a few months she weighed about 90 pounds. And she still slept at the foot of my bed. One night, Rudy and Natacha were out, and all of a sudden, the mountain lion started moving its tail and hitting the bed. I woke up, and in the window was a man. He got into the room. I didn’t know who he was. So I said to the mountain lion, ‘Get him!’ She jumped eight feet and landed on his back, and he dove out the window. I saw no trace of him, except for bloodstains on the driveway. Turned out he was a private detective hired by Jean Acker…”’

Lee Tracy - Before the Movies

2007-03-11T14:35:00.000+01:00

Without the benefit of the US version of TCM, you'll have to forgive me for getting wise to Lee Tracy a bit late. Here in the UK we would never have a day where TCM UK would dedicate a whole movie marathon to this Pre-Code dynamo's birthday. Oh, no. If TCM UK did that we wouldn't be able to see Beau Brummel or Quo Vadis for the 6 millionth time. Ughh, for God's sake. But after much searching, and with the help of Forgotten Films, I am steadily working through some of Tracy's best films.

Information on this actor isn't exactly forthcoming on the web (except at Trouble in Paradise, a great blog on Pre-Code cinema) so I decided to do a bit of digging myself and found some interesting information (and GREAT photos - Lee Tracy in his underwear!) of the actor's first starring role on Broadway in a play called, uh, Broadway, in 1926. The play was the 'Hit of Hits' of the New York threater world's golden age in the 1920s: not necessarily the best, or most thought-provoking or wittiest, Broadway was still a smash hit - incredibly fast-paced and funny and, according to author Roger Burke Dooley in Broadway in the Twenties, can be considered the original template for the backstage musical - a genre that would reach its zenith within a few years with 42nd Street and Footlight Parade in the early 1930s.

The 1926 play Broadway follows egotistical, wise-cracking hoofer Roy Lane (Tracy) and a backstage story and featured all the gangsters chorus girls and zippy one-liners of a Warner Bros. Pre-Coder. In need of some reworking, Broadway made the rounds of every producer’s desk in New York until finally Jed Harris, on the verge of his five-year stint as Broadway’s Wunderkid, decided he could do something with the story. What he needed was Lee Tracy for the lead and writer George Abbott to tighten the script.

Tracy had appeared in a few good roles on Broadway by 1926 but nothing that of the calibre of Roy Lane. Tracy had apparently already developed his unique voice and staccato delivery because, according to Dooley, Harris picked up the play in the first place because he thought Tracy could bring life to the main character an recruited Abbott because he was already a fan of Tracy’s talents as an actor. The script was then fine-tuned with Tracy in mind and the old-fashioned vaudeville gags were weeded out to make room for hard-boiled wisecracks -

Roy: “Believe me, it pays for a girl to be good,”
Chorus Girl: “Sure, but not much.”

and naïve yet endearing egotism -

Roy: “I got personality, personality plus...There’s nothing swelled head about me. I coulda been that way a long time ago if I’d wanted to.”

The backstage plot involves a run-in with gangsters and a rivalry for the affections of Billie, the sweet but green chorus girl, between Roy and bootlegger Steve Crandall. Roy thinks Billie is a “mighty nifty little chick,” and plans to do a vaudeville act with her called Roy Lane and Company. “I and she are doing a lot of practicing together,” he explains.

The inevitable scuffle, murder and “lets put on a show” ensues and Roy exclaims:

"Our names will be in bright lights soon – Roy Lane and Company! Remember, you’re artist. Here we go…here we go…”

Dooley explained in his review of Broadway: “Certainly there was nothing cerebral about this play of the decade…Broadway merely raced across the surface, its message, if any, lying in the fact that the sophistication of its sharpie characters was only skin deep.” But, according to Dooley, Broadway had a sort of realism or, at the very least, immediacy and reflected what audiences perceived to be going on just outside the threatre anyway and:

“…it was presented at the Broadhurst with the kind of excitement only Americans seem able to provide in the threatre. Direction and pace were inspired. Where the average play had only fifty entrances and exits, this one offered 130. With split-second timing, actors dashed in, spoke lines, and exited, bringing an almost unbearable tension to the action. Nothing was overlooked. When the headwaiter rushed up the stairs to the dressing rooms, the audience heard the coins jangling in his pocket. And with all the excitement and realism, it was a happy play, as Brooks Atkinson has pointed out. Actors and audience seemed to conspire to have a good time. Thousands of backstage plays, movies, and TV dramas since the premiere of Broadway have inured us to this genre, but here was the daddy of them all, and it brought a sensation…There were also examples of the fine art of hoofing, hair-pulling fights between cute chorus girls, the tough talk (but no profanity) of the profession, and the acrid smoke of gangland guns. In the second act Roy changed his pants and walked about in his shorts, even proposing to Billie that way. Such informality was fresh and stimulating.

“As a play Broadway exemplified a new kind of reportorial playwriting. Reflecting tumultuous times, it was as exciting as tomorrow’s tabloids. Broadway starred a trand of journalistic drama that remains alive to this day.”

Alexander Woollcott wrote: “Of all the scores of plays that shuffled in endless procession along Broadway…the one which most forcibly caught the accent of the city’s voice was the one named after the great Midway itself, this taut and telling cartoon, produced with uncommon imagination and resource.”

I'm faaammmoouuuss!!!

2007-02-25T23:22:00.000+01:00

I was doing a Google blog search and found my very own little blog, with only 2,000 hits (some of which were fudged so I wouldn't have to start at zero) mentioned on Vanity Fair's blog. Here's the link:
James Wolcott's Blog: Loose Lips Sink Ships.

Woo hoo!

They Were Abused...

2007-02-20T15:42:00.000+01:00

I picked up a copy of Scott Eyman's biography Print The Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford recently. I've never had much of an interest in Ford, despite the fact that this guy directed considerably more than his fair share of all-time classic films. I think it was because I associated his so closely with Westerns - and with John Wayne - that my disinterest in these two genres always made me skip over the obligatory respects all film historians must send his way. I'm glad I picked up the book though, because it's spilling over with fascinating anecdotes from a career that spanned decades and quite a few genres outside the legendary Ford Western.

The one I picked out is from the set of They Were Expendable (1945):

The film was shot, of course, after both John Ford and Robert Montgomery had returned from their war service, Ford a Commander in the Field Photo Unit and Bob a Lt. Commander in the Navy. But when the cameras began to roll, Montgomery had a panic attack: "I realized I'd forgotten everything," Montgomery said, "forgotten acting, forgotten what the whole thing was about. I felt I couldn't do it anymore. I was desperate." Ford was sympathetic, no doubt he could relate to the Montgomery's struggle to return to "normal" life after the war. On top of that, Eyman suspected Ford had a certain amount of respect for the actor because, "[Despite being] one of the chilliest actors in Hollywood; his patrician airs would, under normal circumstances, have made him a prime candidate for a lengthy series of scathing put downs...Montgomery was a hard-core Navy man. He had earned his right to play a hero."
Ford was patient and flexible with Montgomery, and told the actor to focus on the physical aspect of the role, the mechanics of running the PT boats familiar to him from his wartime service, until he got his nerve back. Ford, however, wasn't nearly so considerate with the others, especially John Wayne.
Ford was famous for abusing his actors - Ward Bond was one frequent victim. In Print The Legend, Eyman tells the story of the director's trip to Europe in the 1930s, during which Ford sent a picture of the ass of every statue he encountered and sent the photos to Bond with the message "Thinking of you." John Wayne was similarly berated.
Poor John Wayne. Stories of Ford's abuse bring to mind the young actor as he appeared in Babyface, big and awkward, being taken advantage of by someone physically weaker but mentally stronger. This may not be fair to the Duke, and I don't want to over-indulge in the tearing down of Hollywood legends, but the He-Men of the Screen seem to lend themselves so easily to such observations. On Wayne's part, Ford mainly got respect, cooperation - and probably bewilderment - in return. "I really had no intention of being an actor," Wayne remembered years later. "I had no desire for it. I just wanted to be like John Ford. I just looked up to this man Ford - he was a big hero to me." Eyman ventures to explain this hero worship as a sort of search, on the part of the Duke, for a strong father figure. Wayne's own father was apparently a hen-pecked pharmacist, Ford was a tough guy who knew how to get his way. And that meant, on many occasions, bullying John Wayne.

The on-set abuse during the shooting of Expendable followed along the usual lines and then, finally, when Ford was ridiculing Wayne's un-serviceman like salute, Robert Montgomery snapped. According to Eyman "Montgomery walked over, placed his hands on both sides of the director's chair and said, 'Don't ever talk to Duke like that. You ought to be ashamed.' The set fell silent. A break was ordered, and Ford ended up in tears."
For a great photo and ever-brilliant commentary on this relationship, see Greenbriar Pictureshow's entry John Wayne in a Very Uncomfortable Position.
And here's the trailer for They Were Expendable.

Kevin Brownlow's "Hollywood"

2007-02-06T11:56:00.000+01:00

The silent film documentary series Hollywood, by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, was supposed to have been released on DVD recently but, due to wranglings over copyright issues regarding the film clips used in its 13 installments (why can't we just SEE THESE THESE FILMS for Pete's sake?), the release date has been put back until further notice. This is a shame. And ironic: Brownlow went to great lengths in his research with the idea of presenting to viewers an unfairly forgotten part of their cultural history and the Suits Who Own the Rights to these clips are doing their damnedest to make sure they stay forgotten. Why? Why?!

But until some sort of agreement is reached, we'll have to be content watching these uploaded episodes, courtesy of Google Video. Although not the greatest in sound/picture quality, some wonderful person has posted a few installments of this treasure trove of a series. Just a few out of the full 13, but certainly enough to give you an idea how much more there will be to see someday. Here is one of them:

Hollywood: Episode 12. Star Treatment.
The highs and lows of silent film stardom, featuring the era's two most tragic victims: Clara Bow and John Gilbert.

The interviews might seem familiar, and that's because so many film historians who have followed since have pulled quotes from this series for use in their own works, with Brownlow's interviews serving as the closest they'll ever get to first-hand accounts of Hollywood in the early days. Brownlow was fast enough and smart enough to catch so many of the most interesting and eloquent survivors of the silent period before they passed on, and the resulting interviews are invaluable. One interview with a King Vidor, an Adela St. Johns or a Louise Brooks is worth a million photos, letters, diaries or magazine clippings one might dig up. And with those above-mentioned clips, it's like dying and going to heaven for 52 glorious minutes.

I posted this episode because I'm a big John Gilbert fan, not to mention Clara Bow. The stories of both of these two supremely loveable screen personalities are tragic beyond belief. Clara Bow was probably the most animated, vivacious, joyous presence the movies have ever seen, yet even at the height of her fame she was an outcast. Chastised for her sexy screen persona and excluded from Hollywood society, the poor girl was used and abused - and a discarded has-been at 26. John Gilbert, an actor who gave so much of himself in many of the most touching and expressive performances of the silent era that he actually became dependent on his films to provide a character for him to play in real life, had nothing left when MGM brought him back down to Earth after the talkies. There is one beautiful moment in this episode in which DeMille actress Leatrice Joy, Gilbert's then-wife, recalls a love letter the actor wrote to her in the 1920s. Gilbert, always affectionate, demonstrative and romantic in the extreme, signed a swooning message to his 'beloved wife, on whom God patterned the angels' on a photograph and Leatrice, 50 years later, began to all at once laugh and cry at the memory. Heart-wrenching. Brownlow wrote in the book that accompanied this series that he considered himself lucky to have met this fascinating generation of movie people:

One thing that strikes you at once [about the movie veterans he interviewed] is their humour. Behind it, you can sense the enjoyment that must have been such an integral part of early film making. Compared to their counterparts today, the early film people might seem innocent. It's not entirely true, of course, but they had an attractive, almost ingenuous optimism. They were often tough, funny, kind, sentimental, and most that I have met were immensely likeable.

I for one am most envious, and very grateful.

When talkies really talked...

2007-01-29T16:38:00.000+01:00

I found a great little article at a website called Films in Review that I thought fans of the early talkie pre-coders might like. It's called 'The Age of Chiselry' and it's all about the snap-crackle-pop dialogue of the early talkies. Cagney, Blondell, Tracy and Edward G. all get a mention plus the writer, Daniel Riccuito, includes a few quotable quotes at the end. Definitely worth a look!

The Age of Chiselry

The Half Naked Truth

2007-01-17T11:03:00.000+01:00

The Half Naked Truth [1932] Dir. Gregory LaCava. Starring Lee Tracy, Lupe Velez, Gene Pallette, Frank Morgan.

'The bucolic gentry will no longer pay for the old faldaldo... the strong man shall weep! The world is greased with banana oil - banana oil professor! The people want excitement, sensation, baloney - and we've got to give it to 'em! And one more thing, if you give them what they think they want, they'll want what they think you give them!' (Jimmy Bates)

From 1932 to 1934 there was but one man who truly epitomized Hollywood's wisecracking newspapermen, PR phonies and the loudmouth agents: Lee Tracy. The Broadway actor turned on screen anti-hero may not have had matinee idol looks, but Tracy was a comedic dynamo who more than made up for it in manic energy and fast-talking charisma, making him Pre-Code's quirkiest leading man. In The Half Naked Truth, Tracy goes to work as the unscrupulous carnival barker Jimmy Bates who takes small-time hoochie coochie dancer Teresita, aka 'The Tamale' (and played with comic brilliance by the beautiful Lupe Velez), all the way to the heights of Broadway fame and back again. This has to be one of the funniest films of the 1930s...

Frustrated by his meagre existence 'getting dimes out of hicks' at the carnival in Appleton, PA, Bates and sidekick Achilles (Pallette) create a stir when they fabricate a story for the townspeople that the dancer is in search of the man who 'deceived' her mother years ago in that very town. The plot backfires and the trio just escape with their lives but, with Jimmy's talent for talk, they're on to greater things - 'stick with me baby and the next stop is Broadway!'. When they hit New York, Bates wrangles his way into the royal suite at the Savoy Hotel after he tells curious onlookers that The Tamale is actually a Turkish princess, complete with pet lion and attending eunuch(!).

Jimmy goes to work getting his girl into Merle Farrell's Ziegfeld-style review and after talking circles around the poor, flustered Farrell (Morgan) - and horrifying him with The Tamale's racy version of 'the Carpenter song' - Jimmy wins him over and The Tamale is put in the show. But when Farrell's idea of sultry Turkish music and mood lighting fails, Bates takes it upon himself to save the act by breaking on to the stage and telling the audience the Turkish dance is a forbidden one, but the little dancer will now do a dance she learned on the boat to America - 'Hey, Mr. Carpenter.'

But once at the top The Tamale begins to take Jimmy, who is in love with her, for granted and gets romantic with Farrell. Once wronged, Jimmy unleashes his wrath in a hilarious torrent of pranks on the long-suffering Farrell to sabotage the partnership and creates a new star out of the maid from the Savoy, who Bates reinvents as a nudist, and The Tamale is back to her old act in the carnival.

Off colour jokes abound, The Half Naked Truth is of a great pre-code vintage. Gregory LaCava directed - also responsible for the equally manic My Man Godfrey a few years later - and had an acute sense of the comically absurd and wasn't afraid to apply it to the lampooning of the cult of celebrity, homosexuality, nudism, race, even domestic abuse (Jimmy is forever threatening to sock Teresita, and eat her dog Nina with mustard...) All the while Velez is singing her trademark song 'Hey, Mr. Carpenter', an Ethel Waters-style blues ditty full to the brim with sexual innuendo.

Watch a clip of 'Hey, Mr. Carpenter'

Perhaps the funniest moment in the film. Velez more than holds her own against the stage-trained whirlwind Tracy and her idiotic glee in singing this rude little song to staid Broadway patrons is exhilaratingly funny...

To read more on the great LaCava, whose career may have hit its comedic peaks in the 1930s but was directing motion pictures as far back as 1916, go to the Bright Lights Film Journal for a great profile on the man Gary Morris argues was a 'Forgotten Master'.

Twelve Miles Out: A John Gilbert rarity!

2007-01-16T09:55:00.000+01:00

Twelve Miles Out [1927]. Dir. Jack Conway. Starring John Gilbert, Ernest Torrence, Joan Crawford.

What a find! I never thought I'd be able to get hold of this rare silent. Never on television and only popping up once in a blue moon on ebay, I picked up Twelve Miles Out at the (now restricted) Forgotten Films. It seems Warners have been at it again...I don't know all the details but does it matter? When it doubt, blame Warners I say...
But anyway, about the film:
Twelve Miles Out is the story of bootlegger Jerry Fay (Gilbert) who, on the run from the U.S. Coast Guard, hides out in the first place he finds on shore and breaks into the home of society girl Jane (Crawford) and her snooty fiance. When the two threaten to turn Jerry in he decides he must take them aboard his boat to keep his cargo safe. At first Jane is horrified by the rough and ready Jerry but, after he betters her weakling fiance and defends her from his lecherous rum-running rival Red (Torrence), she softens up and falls in love. Jerry softens too, and will now do anything to bring Jane back to safety - even if it means turning himself in to the law.
This copy of Twelve Miles Out can't compare in quality to the other Gilbert silents I've obtained like La Boheme, The Merry Widow and The Show, but that isn't a bash at Forgotten Films. It's purely down to the fact that the print currently in circulation just isn't that great. The picture is murky and, at 58 minutes, it's missing another 26 minutes of footage. It's a French print and the English titles have very obviously been pasted over the original ones - sometimes with hilarious results. When Joan Crawford's character, Jane, defiantly warns Gilbert's character, Jerry, that he doesn't scare her (she probably would have said something like 'You don't frighten me - you crook!') the title that has been translated from English to French and then back again says 'You have not succeeded in terrorizing me.' I mean, for God's sake - whoever put these titles together (probably in the 1960s or 70s) put so little thought into the mood, the tone - heck, the plot - of the film that it's lucky the viewer has such a lively performance from Gilbert to keep the thing exciting.

Gilbert and Crawford

That said, the film is still most definitely worth seeking out. It features Gilbert at his most handsome in another one of those charming renegade roles he was so good at; an extremely early Joan Crawford, and an always wonderful Ernest Torrence who, as usual, was picked out by contemporary critics for running away with the picture as the crooked oaf (what a name!) Red MacGut.
Crawford, however, isn't nearly as good - she seems to be fighting a losing battle with the furniture for any sort of screen presence. To be fair this was pretty early on in her career and she was still finding her feet as well as her face (she's barely recognizable!). Still, had you never seen a good Joan Crawford film, you'd wonder how she ever managed one of the longest careers in Hollywood with a start like this. She's stiff, always standing to the side as the real action is carried out by the mega-watt John Gilbert and, to be honest, isn't much to look at anyway. Joan actually manages to look more masculine than Gilbert in Twelve Miles Out - and Jack has the benefit of a moustache! That Eton Crop and those straight serious eyebrows didn't do Crawford any favours and, luckily, they didn't last long. By the time she reteamed with Gilbert a year later in Four Walls she had entered her jazz baby phase and had acquired a much more lively, more feminine appearance.

Gilbert himself hated the film, and admitted to the papers that he never saw the finished product. He'd helped write sections of the screenplay but those scenes were deleted upon release, which certainly wouldn't have encouraged any affection he might have otherwise had for the project to begin with. (Perhaps they were some of the scenes featuring Eileen Percy and Dorothy Sebastion? These two actresses are listed in the original credits but today none of their scenes survive.)

Jack was also in the middle of his tempestuous relationship with Garbo and had bigger fish to fry with regards to his battle with Louis B. Mayer to get Anna Karenina on film (which would eventually materialise as Love in 1928) so his patience, not to mention attention span, was nil. Crawford said as much years later: 'He was still madly in love with Garbo and the romance wasn't going well. He was like a caged lion. Jack resented every moment he was not with Garbo.' Jack didn't deny his bad mood on set: 'We go around glaring at each other like a lot of spoiled children.'

Critics, however, were much more favourable: 'John Gilbert is at his best as the swearing, fighting, drinking and dashing lawbreaker [and] gives one of the soundest performances of his career,' wrote one critic. The New York Times said: 'It's gory, it's gruesome, but both men shoot with fierce abandon, with such mad joy in the thing even when they are hit, that it all fairly fascinates the spectator, jerking him into another world of savagery and blood...It's not pretty, that's true, but it's not pap. That's great.' While I would agree with this review in general, I'd have to admit that a lot of the excitement of the action scenes has since been hurt by poor picture quality and even worse editing. But the basic film is still there - it's just up to the viewer to imagine the quality these reviewers would have enjoyed back in 1927.

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And for a few screengrabs

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The genius of Paul Muni (and the sexiness of George Raft)

2007-01-09T14:54:00.001+01:00

Scarface (1932). Dir. Howard Hawks. Starring Paul Muni, George Raft, Ann Dvorak, Karen Morley.

'Listen Little Boy, in this business there's only one law you gotta follow to keep outta trouble: do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doin' it.'

While the plenitude of screengrabs in this entry is an attempt to capture the sexiness of a young George Raft, the rest is a tribute to the genius that was Paul Muni. Scarface is an early talkie masterpiece and much of that is down to the sublime performance of this talented actor. Read any study on the films of the 1930s and you'll find that Scarface ranks tops among Little Caesar (1930) and Public Enemy (1931) as a sort of trilogy of classic gangster films. Scarface, in every respect, surpasses the other two with its sophistication and almost mythical quality. It's The Great Gatsby of the underworld: the story of a man who takes the American Dream to the outermost limits until the whole thing comes crashing down around him.

Scarface came to life when millionaire Howard Hughes began looking for his next film project after producing such classics as Hell's Angels and The Front Page, and Howard Hawks was recruited as director to “make [the film] as realistic, as exciting and as grisly as possible.” Screenwriter Ben Hecht added depth to the classic Capone/St. Valentine's Day Massacre theme by creating a modern-day Borgia clan, the Camontes, living in the slums of Chicago. Muni plays Tony Camonte, a star-crossed gangster with a mesmerizing sense of self-destruction, striking out violently at anything that threatens his stake in the bootlegging racket or little sister Cesca.

Helped by coin-flipping sidekick Guino (Raft), whom he nicknames Little Boy, Tony begins to move in on Johnny Lovo's stake in the business as well as his girl, Poppy. Eventually Johnny is bumped off and life begins to look good for Tony - the sign outside his window 'The World is Yours' tells him so - but the inevitable downfall pulls Tony and those around him down in spectacular flames.

Paul Muni truly deserves his place in cinema history for this role (which was inspirational enough for Al Pacino to want to redo it in 1983). I'd read about this film before I saw it for the first time and knew to expect good things, but I was also expecting another Public Enemy that I wouldn't enjoy as much because Cagney wasn't in it. Boy was I wrong - while Cagney is a great screen personality, Muni is a great actor. He started on the stage (in the Yiddish theatre and then eventually on Broadway) and, although he made two appearances on-screen in 1929 (garnering an Oscar nomination with his film debut in The Valiant), it was Scarface, his return to movies in 1932, that really brought him fame and acclaim. His unique talent for burying himself in a variety of roles earned him the nickname 'the new Lon Chaney' and eventually won him an Oscar for The Story of Louis Pasteur in 1936.

George Raft, on the other hand, came from a very different background. He certainly wasn't as talented an actor - Hawks told Raft to keep up the coin-flipping throughout the film to curb his jitters - but he did know a thing or two about gangsters. Raft himself was a former boxer and dancer (coincidentally, just like Cagney) and had worked for real-life gangster Owney Madden, who would go on to play a part in fixing of the World Heavyweight Championship of 1933, before he went to Hollywood in 1928. Scarface provided Raft's first big on-screen role and on the strength of this film, as well as his smooth Valentino-like looks, a career as a sexy leading man and tough guy was launched.

But one of the best things about Scarface is the two women in Tony Camonte's life: his sister and his girl. The girl, Poppy, is played with intelligence by Karen Morley. How did a woman so smart, so no-nonsense, end up in movies? She seems as capable of mastering quantum physics as she is capable maneuvering so skillfully around hot tempered gangsters. What a breath of fresh air after all the gum-smacking, sluttish girlfriends with New Yoik accents! Morley often popped up in unusual films of the early 1930s (like King Vidor's Our Daily Bread), but remembered Scarface as her favourite experience. “Everybody was just in awe of Paul Muni, he was so great. I was just barely of age, and that set was an exciting place to be. It was all men, and there I was prancing around in gowns that barely got past the censors.”

Ann Dvorak, only 19 at the time, played gangly little sister Cesca, struggling under the overprotective attention of her brother which many reviewers have since spotted as a near-incestuous relationship. She steals scenes with ease from George Raft, her character's love interest despite his better judgement. There is some confusion as to whether it was Raft, Joan Crawford or Karen Morley who recommended her to Howard Hughes for the role - I think it was Raft. Hughes invited Raft to a party at his home and brought Dvorak as his date, Ann had a bit too much to drink and begged Raft to have a dance with her. When he said no she did her best to woo him on to the floor by doing a sexy dance that Hughes would later ask her to recreate for the film in the scene at the nightclub.

The final scene in which Dvorak appears with Muni is nothing short of astonishing. Cesca's attempts to keep up with her psychopathic brother are chilling, as a sinister grin breaks across her face and her skinny arms heft a shotgun alongside her brother in the final shootout. It's a stunning scene and one of the most affecting movie moments of the 1930s. How strange that one of the most memorable scenes in American cinema was played by so under-appreciated an actress?

If you want to find out more about Dvorak, check out this link below...

Ann Dvorak: Underground Goddess

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A Boxing Day Special

2006-12-26T14:20:00.000+01:00

This is a photo of Jack and Jim Tully, the writer, succombing to a bit of an in-joke with the publicity department at MGM. Tully was a former boxer who established himself as Hollywood writer both of screenplays and of gossip columns of the Louella Parsons variety. The year here would be 1930 but the two had a history dating back to 1928...

Tully's feature 'John Gilbert -- the Screen's Most Romantic Hero Has No Glamour for Hollywood's Severest Critic' in May 1928's Vanity Fair was basically an attempt at infamy by association: tear down the reputation of the biggest star in Hollywood and win fame yourself for your audacity.

Gilbert had generally received pretty favourable press through the years and, at the time of this article, was getting used to ecstatic praise for his films and his all around unpretentious and demonstrative nature. But when Tully went to work he took below-the-belt shots at the poor actor by accusing him of everything from having The Big Parade stolen from him by co-star Karl Dane to abandoning his own father to poverty as he lived a lavish, movie star lifestyle. He quoted Lon Chaney as saying 'Mr. Gilbert is a young man with a romantic face, almost a high school education and a conceit that through pampering and soft handling has passed all belief. He is a good actor and thinks he is much better. He has forgotten the meaning of tact from disuse of that quality. He loves to impress folks with his greatness by being unpleasant to them.'

Poor Jack, who had somehow been unable to develop a thick skin to these sort of insults despite a career in movies that spanned over a decade, was mortally wounded. He wrote a biography that was printed as a series for Photoplay that same year and his fanmail reached up to 10 thousand letters a week in a show of support, but Gilbert never forgot the article.

Fast forward to 1930: John Gilbert, the Great Lover of the screen, had just endured humiliation at the release of the horrendous His Glorious Night and Redemption and was sensing sabotage but there was no way to pinpoint the culprit. On a night out with friends at the Brown Derby someone points out Tully and Gilbert marches over. 'Get on your feet' he barks and, as Sid Grauman tries to separate the pair, Tully floors the actor in one punch. This publicity photo was most certainly an order by MGM to show that the two had made up and were on their best behaviour. But the humiliation didn't end there - this same year Gilbert was assigned Way for a Sailor, also starring the one and only Jim Tully who doubled as his speech coach.
The tragic irony of this situation surely has Louis B. Mayer's fingerprints all over it.

Joan Crawford - Blonde!

2006-12-20T10:45:00.000+01:00

This Modern Age [1931]

Starring Joan Crawford, Pauline Fredericke and Neil Hamilton.

Here are a few screen shots from This Modern Age, a Pre-Code MGM melodrama starring a young and very blonde Joan Crawford who plays Valentine, an American girl who goes to Paris to visit her estranged mother. It's Pre-Code not because Joan is an unashamed man eater in this one - she plays a youngster perky in the extreme - it's Pauline Fredericke as the mother who, corrupt Frenchwoman she's become, is living in sin with boyfriend Andre. But Val adopts her mother's libertine lifestyle with gusto (and takes on Mummy's alcoholic hanger-on Tony) only to fall in love with a puritanical Bostonian named Bob, (an OK Neil Hamilton) who makes her decide between her love for her long-lost mother and the respectable life she could have ahead of her with him. Along for the ride is her ever-inebriated sidekick Tony (Monroe Owsley - quite cute in a drunken sort of way in this film) who serves as both brotherly companion and back up boyfriend.
The title seems to imply that This Modern Age was at least trying to create the illusion of making some sort of social comment on the morals of modern youth and the temptations of alcohol and easy virtue; but just like all those other Pre-Coders that first warn against the sin depicted in the movie to come, this is the flimsiest of pretences. This Modern Age has plenty of drinking for 1931 (Val, her mother and their entourage seem to live on nothing but champagne), plenty of frantic parties for Depression era audiences and Joan Crawford in a bathing suit.

Also, look for silent film veteran Hobart Bosworth as Bob's cranky dad and Ann Dvorak in a miniscule role as an extra in one of the party scenes.

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Lee Tracy - at his best!

2006-12-20T10:32:00.000+01:00

Lee Tracy

Blessed Event [1932} Dir. Roy Del Ruth. Starring Lee Tracy, Ruth Donnelly, Dick Powell.

'Try a Hurricane Cocktail - one part gin, one part tomato juice, and one part champagne and you'll never know there was a Depression...'

Blessed Event is an energetic pre-coder that features a young Lee Tracy at his best - and that's pretty damn good. Tracy plays Alvin Roberts, a gossip columnist (based on real-life Broadway broadcaster Walter Winchell and his column 'Your Broadway and Mine') who goes a bit too far with his ‘blessed event’ announcements on New York society’s sexual goings on. While covering for the resident Broadway reviewer on New York's Daily Express, Roberts drums up unprecedented interest with his tawdry new take on society gossip and gets a bit big-headed with his readership numbers, his celebrity and the number of libel suits he racks up in the process. But when he gets tangled up in deals with the city’s gangsters and a singer who begs him to keep her name out of the papers, the morality of his mercenary gossip comes between himself and the girl (Glad, played by Mary Brian) he loves.

James Cagney walked off the set of this film in the first of his major squabbles with Warner Bros, so was replaced by Lee Tracy (whom, incidentally, Cagney had understudied only a few years back on Broadway). The movie would certainly have had a different tone with Cagney. Could Dick Powell (radio crooner and Alvin Roberts’ arch rival Bunny Harmon) really get away with calling Roberts a ‘public nuisance’ without the square sock in the jaw such a smarmy so-and-so actually deserved? Surely he would have been roughed up in a Cagney film. And could Cagney have popped up so gloriously as that nuisance reporter with a stroke of a pointed finger, exclaiming that ‘Mr. Alvin Roberts is here, as advertised’? Cagney is Cagney but, man, this movie is great with Tracy. Who else can sport a typewriter and a quick one-liner better than Lee Tracy? After all, he WAS Broadway's original Hildy in The Front Page.

Blessed Event is hilarious and the fast-paced comedy is nothing short of exhilarating. It has all the Depression-era cliches you could hope for before they were cliches – fast talking reporters, New York gangsters, smug crooners and lots of pre-code plot twists that you wouldn’t find after 1934. (Dorothy Lane, the singer Alvin Roberts names and shames for having the illegitimate child of a gangster, Alvin's mother mutters a startling 'Well I'll be damned' seven years before Rhett Butler uttered that taboo word, etc.) Yet Blessed Event is still pretty light as far as pre-coders go in the sense that the main character doesn't sleep/shoot his/her way to the top - instead he gossips his way up there.
Tracy is in tip top form and has a great supporting cast to bounce off in Blessed Event: Ruth Donnelly as secretary Stevie (who pops up in TONS of movies at this time: four in 1932 and FIFTEEN in 1933) make a great pair. Donnelly can match Tracy’s zingers line for line in her own distinct style of delivery without the usual sexual tension most films would rely on. There’s the classic scene in which she looks up the definition of ‘nadir’ - a word one of Roberts’ rivals has used to describe him. ‘So I’m a nadir am I?’ Tracy exclaims – ‘It comes from the Arabian,’ Donnelly adds helpfully, reading from the dictionary. Tracy flips - 'Why I'll... If they've ever done anything, or if their grandmother's done anything..' and throughout the rest of movie, Roberts refers to himself as ‘an Arabian nadir’ ('it's an old family custom - a nadir never forgets' and so on). And then there’s the scene in which Tracy talks the gangster out of bumping him off by describing the way a criminal goes up to the electric chair – has anyone ever been able to talk as fast as Lee Tracy?

The wonderfully deadpan Ned Sparks plays long-suffering Moxley, the columnist Roberts bumps out of job and into the position of 'Pet Editor' for the Express ('Anytime your cat needs a midwife, give me a ring...') Plus you’ll spot Edwin Maxwell as gangster Gobel, Allen Jenkins (who appeared with Tracy in The Front Page on Broadway) as dopey hard man Frankie, and Charles Lane in a walk-on part as a reporter. Oh, and Isabel Jewell, Tracy's real-life girlfriend as Dorothy Lane.

And then there's Dick Powell, who is actually quite good as Roberts' annoying nemesis Bunny. That's because annoying is the key word - Powell is great at doing annoying. I never liked him when he appeared in all those musicals with Ruby Keeler but here Powell has more to do than croon while being encircled by Busby Berkeley babes, and really makes a great debut. This was his first big role in a motion picture (the trailer introduces him as such - 'you'll love this boy - he's marvellous'). He gets to sing a few great tunes ('How Can You Say No, When All the World is Saying Yes' and 'Too Many Tears') and really rounds off the cast of Blessed Event nicely.

As for Lee Tracy, he rarely had a chance to better the performance he gives here in Blessed Event. Until that fateful 'urinary malfunction' in Mexico while on the set of Viva Villa in 1934, he was building up a steady string of great performances in good to great pictures but, having incurred the wrath of Louis B. Mayer by weeing on the Mexican flag in a drunken haze, the poor man never had quite the same offers in film. Today, most fans say Tracy is golden in just about every moment on-screen up to 1934 and it's best to stop there. Have a look at the TCM website for the trailer HERE. Just click on the multimedia link...

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Birth of a Movie Star - Rudolph Valentino

2006-12-19T11:52:00.000+01:00

The Sheik [1921] Dir. George Melford. Starring Rudolph Valentino, Agnes Ayres, Adolphe Menjou.

The year 1921 was certainly the year of Valentino. Rex Ingram's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had been released and Hollywood took notice of the handsome Italian actor who had been working for the past few years in bit parts as villains and gangsters but who was now being featured as a seductive leading man. Rudy was a sensation, especially for the famous tango scene, and followed this hit with three more films in that year: Uncharted Seas, Conquering Power, and Camille. But it wasn't until completing his final film of 1921 that Valentino would begin to experience the hysteria that has since become part of his legend, making him cinema's first celebrity and the embodiment of female desire - The Sheik.

The Sheik was, even for a generation who had just recently seen women bob their hair, get jobs and win the right to vote, a revelation for the 'gentler' sex. It was soft porn for the Jazz Age and it was one of the most popular films of the year. Here was a film that showed an adventurous, independent young woman (played by actress Agnes Ayres) kidnapped and held against her will by an impossibly gorgeous, rich and sexy Prince (Valentino), raped and - lo and behold, once he shows his sensitive side - she likes it. With The Sheik, Valentino would create an iconic 'type' that was all at once dangerous, modern, passionate and erotic while still being vulnerable enough for fans to feel that the man really just needed the love of a good woman to be complete. The female half of the moviegoing world went wild.

The Sheik was based on the book of the same name written by English spinster Edith Maude Hull - a novel that allowed women to read about their fantasies while still absolving the female character of the guilt involved in enjoying sex, and it was a bestseller. And remember this was the age of Elinor Glyn - the other middle-aged English spinster who was also the titan of low-brow romantic fiction and who conquered Hollywood with her bombastic notions of romance and nobility. It was Glyn's overheated imagination from which sprang the bodice-ripper Three Weeks (which would also be put on screen in the mid-20s). The Sheik was right at home in Hollywood.

The story follows fiesty British ex-pat Diana who is exploring the French Sahara with brother Sir Aubrey, and decides she wants to go out on an expedition without a chaperone - scandalizing the elderly inabitants at Biskra. But no sooner does Diana cross that first sand dune than she is taken away by the dashing Prince Ahmed Ben Hassan and is held captive in his dwelling in the desert. And you can imagine what happens after that...

Well it was pretty steamy stuff, and Valentino's sexiness rating went off the charts with female fans who secretly wanted to be kidnapped too. Supposedly after The Sheik's release, police departments across the country were chasing after young girls who were running away to the desert in a misguided attempt to get swept off their feet by their own sheik. The film was a phenomenon, lending its name to popular slang throughout the decade and even to a brand of condoms by the 1930s. Movie actors thereafter adopted Valentino's slicked back suavity if they could pull it off and soon every other leading man had to be a Latin Lover or at least some approximation of such sophistication. Valentino became the first movie star who was also a sex symbol.

But while poor Valentino became the personification of sex and power on-screen, he had plenty of undeniably rough blows to his masculinity off it. His first wife, Jean Acker, hadn't bothered to tell him she was a lesbian and as his past came back to haunt him when he found celebrity, rumours of a gigilo lifestyle back in New York further contradicted the dashingly romantic character Valentino was consistently being forced to play on film. Men hated the poor man, threatened by his hold on their womenfolk's imaginations. He was frequently called a powder puff and Valentino took these jibes seriously. So seriously that when a Chicago columnist casually insulted his masculinity Rudy challenged the man to a boxing match - which the actor won.

You can see a clip of The Sheik at Doctor Macro's website by clicking HERE. It's a great little scene - the one in which Diana is taken into the Prince's tent and told to slip into something, ahem, more comfortable.

And if you STILL want to see more Rudy for free, go to Movieflix, where you can see both Blood and Sand and The Eagle, often said to be Valentino's best performance.

And on a final note, here is Photoplay's thoughts on The Sheik:

Photoplay, January, 1922:
Here is romance. Red-hot. If you read the story you will go to see the filmization. If you haven't, you will go anyway. This is popular entertainment - that and nothing more. But that is enough. The best-selling story by E.M. Hull, scoffed at by the higher-browed critics, but read and re-read by two thirds of the women in this country, has been made into a very exciting, very old-fashioned photoplay.
It's the old-time adventure, much more artistically presented than formerly, but still just a glorified movie. The exquisite Agnes Ayres as Diana, the English heroine, and Rudolph Valentino in the title role, perform their parts splendidly. George Melford's directio is, as usual, competent, but not unusual. You should see this film if you aren't too weary to imagine that you might have been Diana and The Sheik living their desert romance.

He Who Gets Slapped

2006-12-06T13:48:00.000+01:00

He Who Gets Slapped [1924] Starring Lon Chaney, Norma Shearer, John Gilbert, Tully Marshall and Marc MacDermott.

He Who Gets Slapped was MGM's pretigious maiden release since becoming a studio and really has the talent on display. Lon Chaney, who had success the previous year with The Hunchback of Notre Dame; young Norma Shearer was a star quickly on the rise, Tully Marshall, who seems to pop in nearly EVERY film of the 1920s (he was in 15 in 1922, 17 in 1923 and 10 in 1924 - not bad for a man nearing 60!); Marc MacDermott, another soon-to be-be stalwart of the early MGM; and John Gilbert - who had had recent successes in St. Elmo, Cameo Kirby and His Hour. Here Gilbert plays a secondary character - I would assume to add weight to the already impressive cast by putting a leading man in a supporting role. But He Who Gets Slapped is really a Chaney picture and a good one at that.

Chaney plays Paul Beaumont aka HE, an inventor who feels humiliated and betrayed by his colleagues and by life. In a symbolic gesture he takes up work as a clown whose principle act is to get slapped in the face before a laughing public. HE tries to control his painful feelings through this masochistic ritual but is only more damaged as a result. The final blow comes when fellow circus performer Consuelo (Shearer) laughs and slaps HE in the face when he professes his love - she thinks he's still joking - and it is too much for HE to bear.

Pretty sophisticated stuff. He Who Gets Slapped was based on the play HE, the One Who Gets Slapped, by Leonid Andreyev and directed by Victor Sjostrom. No doubt Irving Thalberg had a hand in this - the producer always had an eye out for the occasional project that would lend prestige to the industry and would prove a good judge on such ventures many times after Slapped. His leading lady Norma, of course, had her eye on Irving and the two would be married within three years. (Film historian Cari Beauchamp said that the joke at MGM was that Norma chased Irving 'until she let him catch her'.) The romance was a rebound affair (Shearer had broken up with director Victor Fleming and Thalberg had been dumped by Constance Talmadge) but it would prove to be a happy one until Irving's death in 1936.

But back to the film and to Gilbert. Jack's role as Bezano is a relatively small one (considering he had been picked out as a strong romantic lead in Elinor Glyn's bodice-ripper His Hour, his 1924 production just before Slapped). Gilbert's scenes are few, always with Shearer, but they are sweet and the picnic scene from which these screen grabs were taken was beautifully shot.

You can see a clip of this scene on the TCM website HERE.

Gilbert and Shearer would appear together in several films in that year (The Wolf Man, The Snob and Slapped and then again in 1929 with The Hollywood Revue) and they would both be at one time or another considered MGM's top leading man and woman. But while Shearer was wisely (although genuinely) shacking up with the head of production, Gilbert of course chose the opposite path: confrontation with Mayer. While Shearer was one of the family, Gilbert was the constant thorn in Mayer's side. He was hated personally and, among other things, he and his agent taught new arrival Greta Garbo how to do a deal Hollywood style and get the money she deserved from the studio after their pairing in Flesh and the Devil in 1927. But in MGM's early days in 1924 all this seems a long way off...

And here's a review from Movie Weekly, Nov. 1924:

'Occasionally an exceptional picture comes along which makes no attempt to pander to the box office. "He Who Gets Slapped" is one of this sort, an artistic masterpiece.

The fantastic story concerns a brilliant scientist who is betrayed by his wife and best friend, his success shorn from him by their conspiracy. Crushed and beaten, he becomes a clown who convulses his public by permitting himself to be slapped in the face, because life has become a slap in the face to him.

Who but Lon Chaney could be cast for such a role? His make-up, as usual, is perfect, and he gives a magnificent performance, full of pathos that brings a gulp to your throat.

Norma Shearer and John Gilbert supply the love interest. They have been appearing together frequently of late and are almost an unbeatable screen team.

Victor Seastrom is to be congratulated on his masterly direction of this excellent play. And Metro-Goldwyn is to be congratulated because of their willingness to buy stories for their sheer artistry.'

And a few essays on Chaney himself:

Lon Chaney Sr. - Supermasochist! Much of what writer Gary Morris has to say on the actor is quite applicable to He Who Gets Slapped.

Lon Chaney died 76 years ago today! The always wonderful Greenbriar Pictureshows Blog with a great entry on the actor by blogger John McElwee.

La Boheme

2006-10-18T01:11:00.000+01:00

La Boheme, 1926. Directed by King Vidor, starring Lillian Gish, John Gilbert, Renee Adoree, George Hassell, Roy D'Arcy, Karl Dane.

If you've ever seen The Big Parade (1925), the following year's La Boheme might give you the good ole deja vu. Just look at that lineup. Vidor directing; Gilbert, Adoree, and Dane in starring roles; Harry Behn on script duties - and I'm sure some of the sets from the scenes in Parade's French village were used again in this one as well. (They were certainly used again in 1928's The Show.) This was early MGM - only a year after its formation - and while the studio obviously had an impressive collection of talent in its first five years, certain names keep popping up alongside each other and Louis B. wouldn't be able to make the famous "more stars than there are in the Heavens" claim for a few years yet. Gilbert would work with Vidor, Adoree and Dane on several films, not to mention co-starring with the wonderful Roy D'Arcy in The Merry Widow in 1925.

La Boheme is a beautiful looking film, if a little flat. Jack is again quite good in this one, and certainly got better notices from contemporary critics than did Miss Gish or, well, the rest of the film. Motion Picture Magazine's May 1926 review raved: "...now let us go on to the real reason for the great popularity of "La Boheme." It is the performance of John Gilbert. We are getting tired of praising Mr. Gilbert, but what can we do about it? He runs away with the picture; he makes the production. Here is acting so exuberant, so filled with human emotions, so gay, colorful and live, that it fairly burns up the celluloid. Mr. Gilbert is a perfect Rodolphe."

But overall, the critic found the rest of the film lacking the energy Gilbert himself embodied. He blamed the script and, for lack of any superior insight, I would have to agree. "The script... quite deliberately overlooks some of the best incidents of the story. All the coquetry of the meeting between Mimi and Rodolphe is carefully washed out and the joyous Mimi who so impulsively falls in love becomes merely a wretched little waif and a fit subject, not for a love affair, but for a settlement worker. Musetta's gorgeous entrance is changed to a commonplace introduction and the poignant episode of the muff is scarcely touched upon. It's a cautious script, tailored for the limitations of Miss Gish, but not a colorful one."

The review goes on to lament the wasted opportunity of using Adoree's talent more prominently in the film, and I for one would have enjoyed seeing more of the actress as "the soft woman", Musette. It would have been great to see more of D'Arcy as well as the villain Vicomte Paul, but this is Lillian Gish's show.

Gish didn't get the critical praise she generally gets today for this role upon its release in 1926. The same critic who mourned the film's "washed out" quality said of the actress: "Lillian Gish's Mimi is just what this confirmed old cynic thought it would be. It has moments of beauty and it has moments of pathos. And, altho a veteran of the screen, Miss Gish photographs like a child. But she is never, for a single second, a spirited and joyous Mimi. Miss Gish's Mimi is beaten from the start. In her love scenes, she cringes and shrinks - something that no girl should do, on or off the screen. There is a fine distinction between positive virtue and negative virtue that she doesn't seem to understand."

However, in 1996 Hal Erickson wrote for the All Movie Guide: "Though John Gilbert hams it up, Lillian Gish's brilliant performance is a model of restraint and subtlety."

Gish had just signed a $400,000 contract with MGM and, with her status as not only a pioneer in movie acting but also as a certified screen legend so early in cinema's existence, the actress was also given the right to choose her projects and of approval of co-stars and directors. La Boheme was Gish's first MGM production. And it is most likely Gish's fault that La Boheme fails to really turn on the passion.

In Leatrice Fountain's biography on Gilbert, she details the frustrations Vidor and Thalberg had with Gish's ultra-professional yet cold performance. When Thalberg saw the rushes he noticed there was one vital element missing from the love scenes between Rudolphe and Mimi - there were no kisses! Gish was more interested in conveying the tragedy of Mimi using her trademark attention to detail than she was in making love with Rudolphe, but MGM was not about to waste their Great Lover in a film that didn't show off his romantic skills. So reshoots were ordered and during the filming it was rumoured that Gilbert became infatuated with Gish and tried desperately for her attention but the ultimate screen Virgin politely declined.

To see Gilbert's Rudolphe alongside Gish's Mimi makes his crush on the actress seem a bit curious. Not that it couldn't be true: perhaps Lillian's romantic appeal during the 1910s and 1920s just hasn't aged in a way that we today can understand. But Gilbert was famous for being vibrant, energetic and charismatic while having a sort of earnest, all-American quality. Lillian Gish was nothing if not ethereal...she is barely of this world and seems at any moment to be ready to take flight from the scene like a delicate bird. Although both actor and actress turn in great performances in this film, Gilbert very nearly blasts Gish off the screen with his energy. The two characters seem to be acting in different, if equally meritous, films.

If you'd like to see a clip of this film, have a look on the TCM Multimedia site by clicking HERE. A short clip that will have to do until I am able to get my own clips back on the web!
And here's a beautiful publicity still of Gilbert and Gish:

Gish and Gilbert in La Boheme

Jazz Age Fitzgerald

2006-10-05T09:44:00.000+01:00

Fitzgerald in the early 1930s

This excerpt from Crazy Sundays, a book about Fitzgerald's inability to fit in and make a success of himself in the movie colony, is a story of one of Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer's Sunday teas in the early 1930s. Everyone wanted to attend these parties - they offered rare and invaluable access to Thalberg - and Fitzgerald was invited to one of these gatherings upon his arrival in Hollywood.

The writer made a valiant effort to stay away from the drink (his drunken behaviour by then the stuff of legend) but someone slipped the poor man a cocktail and it all went pear-shaped. Here's what happened:
'Fitzgerald announced to the crowd at large that he wanted to sing. Norma Shearer (Mrs. Thalberg) politely asked what he wanted to sing. A song about a dog he said...Ramon Novarro, who played the title role in Ben Hur, was selected to improvise a piano accompaniment...Cradling [the Thalberg's] dog like a baby in the crook of his arm, the great author sang his lullaby.
'While the crowd of professional entertainers smiled and waited indulgently for the punch line, the singer launched into his second verse...slowly it began to dawn on the restless crowd that that was the punch line. Directly in front of him, Fitzgerald saw the Great Lover of the screen [glare] at him with an eye as keen as the eye of a potato. The Great Lover's name was John Gilbert and he had been known to wear a loaded six gun to such parties...

As Fitzgerald wrote of is protagonist in "Crazy Sundays":

'...as he finished he had the sickening realization that he had made a fool of himself in view of an important section of the picture world, upon whose favor depended his career... He felt the undercurrent of derision that rolled through the gossip; then - all this was in the space of ten seconds - the Great Lover, his eye hard and empty as the eye of a needle, shouted "Boo! Boo!" voicing in an overtone what he felt was the overtone of the crowd. It was the resentment of the professional toward the amateur, of the community toward the stranger, the thumbs-down of the clan.'

Greta Garbo and Ina Claire

2006-09-05T00:33:00.000+01:00

Here's a strange photo: two of silent film star John Gilbert's former loves battling it out on screen - surely his ghost must have been looking on. By the time of the making of Ninotchka in 1939, Jack had been gone for three years but, oh, how interesting it would have been to know what these two had to say to each other! Garbo had (allegedly) been quite close to going with Gilbert to the alter by the end of the 1920s on a number of occasions, most notably the infamous double wedding that never happened for both the famous screen pair and director King Vidor and actress Eleanor Boardman; but Ina Claire actually made it in 1929, becoming the third Mrs. John Gilbert.

Ina was known as the comedic queen of Broadway in the late 1920s (she was originally a Ziegfield girl) and had some success in a few films in Hollywood but, in the end, the marriage between Movie God Gilbert and the lesser known Ina seemed odd to many - Claire was hardly a match for the Swedish Sphinx. But really, just about anyone would have seemed a bit dowdy next to Garbo in her prime. Poor Ina never had a chance...

In 1929 Time Magazine wrote a suitably perplexed account of the Gilbert-Claire marriage which would last from 1929 to 1931:

'In a year filled with the marriages of prodigies - George Herman ("Babe") Ruth to a showgirl; Charles Augustus Lindbergh to the shy, poetic daugther of an Ambassador; James Joseph Tunney to an outdoorish girl descended from one of the great steel families - not the least startling was the marriage of John Gilbert, ballyhooed by millions of shopgirls as the greatest living exponent of male sex appeal, to Ina Claire (Time, May 20). It was particularly startling because up to the moment when their marriage was announced Gilbert was supposed to be betrothed to Greta Garbo, the greatest living exponent of female sex appeal, and Miss Clair to Scenario Writer Gene Markey. She had known Gilbert for only a fortnight. They were married in Las Vegas, Nev., before a little group of cowboys, storekeepers and cinema friends...She has managed to withstand the floodlight of attention which the press of three continents turned loose on her honeymoon abroad, still in progress. There was one crucial night at Cap D'Antibes when she and Gilbert argued about what to do after dinner - he for staying in, she for going out - a night spent so distinctly to her own taste that at 5:30 a.m. Gilbert, still sitting up and still alone, got into his car and drove off at a furious pace into the Riveria dawn. Mrs. Gilbert came home, became excited, threw some things in a suitcase, went away somewhere. Reunited in Paris, they now refer to this incident as a "slight tiff."

(To read the rest of this article, click the link below)
Time Magazine, Sept. 30, 1929.

You see, it all seemed to be a bit of a rebound affair. And it would take a lot more than a few dates with some stray starlets to get Garbo out of Gilbert's head. In Leatrice Gilbert Fountain's biography on her father, she wrote that Garbo did panic and ask for help to stop the wedding when she heard about it (hey, she still had her stuff in Jack's house!) but, once it went through, she never again said anything about any feelings she may have had for Jack. Of course there's no use trying to decipher the mysterious motives of Garbo, and I certainly don't know if Garbo ever loved Gilbert - some say most definitely yes and some most definitely not - but wouldn't it have been a juicy story to get inside these two women's thoughts on the Ninotchka set? Garbo was basically kicked out of the best hotel in the world - John Gilbert's Hollywood pad - and Ina Clair made sure all signs of her were gone when she moved in. Did Garbo hate Claire? Did she think Ina had been duped by the playboy Gilbert? One would assume Ina was intimidated by Garbo but, then again, maybe she thought the actress had abused Jack's affections and attention during their affair? Even blamed Garbo's mistreatment of Gilbert for her own failed marriage? Who knows? I've yet to hear of a backstage catfight that ever involved the withdrawn Garbo so unless anyone can fill me in I would assume this one never boiled over into anything more than a few cool, contemptuous glances.

Desert Nights

2006-08-17T09:24:00.000+01:00

Desert Nights [1929] Starring John Gilbert, Mary Nolan, Ernest Torrence.

I’ll start this entry on Desert Nights with a review:

Mordaunt Hall for the New York Times Review May 6, 1929.

It is a queer string of circumstances that is thrown upon the screen in "Desert Knights," (sic) John Gilbert's latest production. But though this adventure may be, it happens to be one that holds the interest. It has been carefully produced, with the background of the South African veldt, and Mr. Gilbert and Ernest Torrence are perceived after their harrowing experiences with thick beards. The heroine of "Desert Nights" is Mary Nolan, who was known on the stage as Imogene Wilson. She is fair to look at and she gives a good performance. Whether any diamond mine manager would welcome a girl to his arms, as Hugh Rand does Diana, when he knows that her initial intentions were to help her partner in crime, Steve (Mr. Torrence), to steal as many diamonds as possible, is hardly probable. The raison d'etre here is that Diana is contrite as well as being attractive. Perhaps Mr. Rand (Mr. Gilbert) decides that the girl will be glad to live honestly and that she will grow even more beautiful.

Coincidences are not lacking here. Mr. Rand receives word that Lord Somebody and his daughter are on their way to see him at the mine. The redoubtable Steve and Diana then enter Rand's office, posing as the expected visitors. Not so very long afterward Steve, Diana and Rand, with black carriers, go forth into the desert and Steve and Diana assert themselves, after the negroes have deserted.

Steve would not have objected to killing Rand, or leaving him bound so that he would die, but it happens that the diamond thief suddenly remembers that he will not be able to find his way out of the desert. Rand and the others have a hard time through scarcity of water. Diana's pluck, following her denunciation of Steve, wins Rand's favor.

Throughout the desert exploits one gains a corking goodconception of the heat and also the suffering through parched throats. Will Nigh has directed this silent picture with a good sense of drama during these sequences. He reveals, with a restrained hand, that, while Steve is tortured by thirst, he is still eager to hold on to the diamonds.

This rugged specimen of evil humanity sticks by Diana and Rand chiefly because he fears to be alone, but when the time comes and he has quenched his thirst he is only too keen to be off with the water flask, in which he rattles what he thinks to be the precious stones.

Mr. Gilbert gives an earnest showing as Rand, and only rarely does one perceive his wide, artificial smile. Mr. Torrence is capital as Steve. On the surrounding program is a piece called "Dreams of Hawaii," produced by Arthur Knorr, with Dave Schooler officiating as the guiding light for Evelyn Wilson, King, King and King, Dan McCarthy and others.

Thirst and Greed. DESERT NIGHTS, with John Gilbert, Ernest Torrence and Mary Nolan, written by John Thomas Neville and Dale Van Emery, directed by William Nigh; overture, "1812," Tchaikovsky; symphonic arrangement of "Ol' Man River"; "Dreams of Hawaii," with Dave Schooler and others. At the Capitol Theatre.

Hall certainly has it right - Desert Nights is no brain buster and the ending makes no sense at all, but it is fun to watch. The plot is basic, propelled by the logic that presenting a hot and sweaty John Gilbert tied up and at a woman’s mercy - then turning the tables and making her like it - would be good box office. Which of course it was. But complimenting Gilbert's renegade heroics quite well are Nolan and Torrence as the hapless partners in crime. Mary Nolan is quite pretty and is good at being evil and then repentant, but the best of course is Ernest Torrence who, acting-wise is actually much better than Gilbert (although to be fair, Torrence is the inept bad guy - always a better part to play than the dashing hero). Torrence was a Scottish-born actor who began his Hollywood career in 1919 and acted alongside Gilbert in Twelve Miles Out and The Cossacks, but would be more memorable today for such classic silents as Tol’able David with Richard Barthelmess, The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lon Chaney, Peter Pan with Betty Bronson (he played Captain Hook!), Mantrap with Clara Bow, Steamboat Bill, Jr. with Buster Keaton, and the talkie I Cover the Waterfront with Claudette Colbert (you can see this movie for free on MovieFlix) which was to be his last. He died shortly after due to complication resulting from surgery to treat an attack of gall stones at the age 54. One would presume Torrence would have had at least another successful decade ahead of him in pictures had he lived.

And speaking of careers: Desert Nights would, of course, be Gilbert's last silent film before his disasterous sound debut in His Glorious Night. Today Desert Nights is sort of like that self-assured eternity when one reaches the peak of a roller coaster - you have a good look around with a sense of satisfaction that you've made it that high - and then gravity cruelly yanks you back to earth. Jack was a hit in Desert Nights, but it would sadly be his last. Here are some Gilbert links on the wonderful Greenbriar Picture Shows. The guy who writes this blog has an unbelievable knowledge of classic films as well as a delightful collection of images.

GILBERT'S LAST HURRAH THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR JOHN GILBERT

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Man, Woman and Sin

2006-08-09T09:11:00.000+01:00

Man, Woman and Sin (1927) Dir: by Monte Bell, starring John Gilbert, Jeanne Eagels, Gladys Brockwell and Marc McDermott.

John Gilbert plays Albert Whitcomb, a shy young man who gets a job at a local newspaper in his hometown of Washington D.C. to earn money to buy a house for himself and his Ma (Gladys Brockwell), to whom he is devoted. But Albert falls for the beautiful Vera (played by Jeanne Eagles), the society editor who, for a boy who’s just let go of his mother’s apron strings, is beautiful, sophisticated and generally out of this world. Vera is of course not what she seems, and has a secret relationship with the married Editor of the newspaper (Marc McDermott) that Albert is too naïve to see.

Al takes Vera on a date to the zoo in all his endearing innocence, but Vera takes him back to her apartment and the poor boy nearly faints at the idea of getting intimate with his dream girl. So Albert is in love, and sneaks away the money he and his mother were saving together (literally from the cookie jar!) to buy Vera an expensive bracelet. But when he delivers his present he finds Vera’s other man, and accidentally kills him in the fight that ensues. Albert’s life seems sure to be ruined when he’s sent to jail for murder until Mother convinces Vera that she’s the only one who can save her son.

Man Woman and Sin was written and directed by Monte Bell and features a combination of the autobiographical as well as the poetic. Albert is a young man growing up to be a Washington D.C. reporter (like Bell), but his misadventure with Vera closely resembled John Gilbert’ s pet project The Widow on the Bye Street. Louis B. Mayer hated Gilbert’s idea of filming this story, but under the much more commercial Man Woman and Sin, he didn’t recognise the insubordination.

The film was released to lukewarm reviews when it was released. Critics thought it was a risk for The Great Lover of the Screen playing a meek momma's boy (and to Gilbert's credit, he was very good and making his timid character both touching and believable). Variety commented in 1927, "Box office possibilities not above average with the exception of localities where Gilbert is strong enough to draw on name, aided and abetted by the alluring title." One problem the critics had with Gilbert was that, as a man of 31 with broad shoulders and a five o’clock shadow, he was a bit old to be playing a young pup as naïve as Albert. And while I would have to agree that such a big boy should have been a bit more suspicious of a woman like the Eagels’ character, Gilbert’s subtle acting talents keeps the role of the young innocent believable and endearing and avoid the sort of ‘aw shucks, gee’ kind of down-homey performance that this role could easily have slipped into in the hands of a lesser actor.

Gilbert is, in fact, still the main reason to watch this film – at least for me. While Man, Woman and Sin offers a rare chance to for 21st century audiences to see the legendary Jeanne Eagels, it is really Gilbert who is the most affecting...

Kevin Brownlow wrote in his book Hollywood: The Pioneers, that Gilbert “contributed enormously to the richness of the picture.” The clip I’ve posted here illustrates this: it is the scene in which Albert is confronted with Vera’s frank sexual come-on’s after their date, and Gilbert's acting has the effective subtlety found in his best work in The Big Parade and The Merry Widow. When Vera emerges at the top o the stair, Albert is frozen with both fear and wonder. And when she lays herself on the settee for Albert to kiss her, the way Gilbert strokes her hair with his fingers has a romantic as well as erotic effect that would be lost for decades after the coming of sound. This clip (although of a poor, murky picture quality), is silent cinema at its best.

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Watch a scene from the film...

John Gilbert and Jeanne Eagels in a scene from Man, Woman and Sin

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And a few screen grabs...

Downstairs - A Gilbert talkie!

2006-06-27T01:35:00.000+01:00

John Gilbert as Karl in
Downstairs, 1932

Downstairs [1932] Dir. Monte Bell. Starring John Gilbert, Virginia Bruce, Paul Lukas, Hedda Hopper.

Yes, there was a life for John Gilbert in talkies after the disastrous His Glorious Night, although it wasn’t much of one compared to his heyday in the late silent era. But the 1932 film Downstairs is a good example of what perhaps we might have seen had Gilbert been given half a chance by MGM (and movie audiences). Although it’s hard to imagine how The Great Lover would have converted successfully to the more complex character actor that Downstairs presents - wouldn’t it have been nice? He’s superb in this film and manages to produce all those great little gestures in a talkie that he did so well in silent movies and creates a character that is all at once loveable and reprehensible. Just when you want to love him for being so damned adorable he does something to disgust you all over again. Even in the end you don’t know whether to give him a smack on the lips or a good sock on the jaw.

Gilbert and Bruce, 1932

Downstairs features Gilbert as dastardly, dishonest Karl, the new chauffeur of a wealthy household. From the moment Karl first appears on screen it is clear he’s a jerk. The film opens as the head butler and the maid (Lukas and Bruce) of his new employers are having their wedding party and Karl crashes the event. Karl leaves his carriage and tosses the driver a tip so far away that the poor man is forced to scramble for it on hands and knees. He then waltzes up to the main event and kisses the new bride a bit too fully on the lips and introduces himself as the new chauffeur.

From the first, Gilbert establishes the character as one who is good at making situations awkward and using it to his advantage. Karl manages to wedge himself between Anna, the maid, and her husband Albert, the butler; he charms Sophie, the cook, out of her life savings and blackmails the Baroness, his employer, into keeping him in job despite his bad behaviour. By the end of the film everyone has had just about enough and Albert gives him a good kick in the pants out the door, only to let Karl live to lie another day and plant himself into a new house with new opportunities of ne’er-do-well.

The Gilberts on holiday

Gilbert actually wrote Downstairs, and he is noted in the opening credits as the author of the original story. I’ve read that he sold the film to MGM for just $1 because he was so desperate not only to get the story on the screen, but to appear as an actor in a film that had a good plot. It’s a shame Gilbert didn’t benefit more from Downstairs - and it’s also a shame that the only way you can get a copy of it today is by recording it off of TCM. It’s a terrific Pre-Code that really shows off the best of early-1930s Hollywood and is an excellent example of what a talented actor Gilbert actually was.

Fan magazine review of
Downstairs, 1932

If you have a chance to catch this film it’s worth all the effort it takes in finding it. There aren’t many films where you can see such a popular actor play so violently against type - did you ever think you would see the great John Gilbert pick his nose? He does - and he gets beaten up, he romances an old woman for her money and is an all around smarmy bastard throughout. Downstairs really deserves a DVD release - perhaps as part of a Pre-Code box set?

Of course, I must mention that Virginia Bruce, the actress who plays Anna, would quite soon become the fourth Mrs. John Gilbert after Downstairs wrapped up. The promotions for the film advertised it as featuring ‘Mr. and Mrs. John Gilbert’ and the couple would, in their two-year marriage, have a daughter together. Virginia would be Gilbert’s last attempt at marriage before his death in 1936. Oh, and by the way, there is by this time no need to mention that Jack's voice is most obviously MORE than adequate -- is there?

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The Merry Widow

2006-06-22T11:14:00.000+01:00

The Merry Widow [1925] Dir. Erich von Stroheim. Starring Mae Murray, John Gilbert, Roy d’Arcy, Tully Marshall.

The Merry Widow was made, by all accounts, in an atmosphere of prima donna behaviour, temper tantrums and ugly insults. While most fingers would point instinctively to von Stroheim, it was actually Mae Murray who managed to surpass the eccentric director with her tempermental antics, often defying logic and good sense with reckless abandon.

The legend of Mae Murray certainly hasn't aged well - she seems to personify the melodramatic, self-important star of the 1920s. She even married bogus royalty - so in vogue at the time. I for one have to jump on this bandwagon - I think she really is a bizarre actress - although The Merry Widow incorporates Murray's sometimes jarring personal qualities well. This must be down to the strange talent of von Stroheim. His directing, striking for the way he combines contrasting shots into sequences that keep the viewer slightly on edge, help make Murray‘s performance not only fit right in, but seem excellent. I’m not an expert on von Stroheim and I’m sure film scholars can explain this quality better than I, but I do think that only with such a director as von Stroheim could so strange an acting technique as Mae’s really exist harmoniously in any sort of situation with normal actors or, heck, human beings come to think of it.

Von Stroheim’s taste for the weird and perverse is allowed to come through in The Merry Widow, although he was reigned in somewhat by his sometime-rival Irving Thalberg. The showcasing of Baron Sadoja’s foot fetish (to which Thalberg offered the puny pun that von Stroheim was a footage fetishist, referring to the pair’s legendary battles over previous von Stroheim productions - namely Greed). The director explained this tendancy by comparing his version of The Merry Widow to Ernst Lubitsch’s in 1934:

‘Lubitsch shows you first the king on the throne, then as he is in the bedroom. I show you the king in the bedroom so you'll you know just what he is when you see him on his throne.’ (Erich von Stroheim)

And so it is at this point, the bedroom, that John Gilbert enters the picture. It was The Merry Widow that really made Gilbert a top rate star - the one that would make audiences believe he could take the place of Rudolph Valentino. He had had successes with The Snob and He Who Gets Slapped and was on the brink of his greatest success, The Big Parade, but The Merry Widow probably marks the moment Gilbert really arrived. He’s young, dashingly handsome and has an unaffected naturalness that I would compare closest to that of Clara Bow. As Prince Danilo, Gilbert received ecstatic reviews - indeed better than Murray or even von Stroheim - and is probably the most enjoyable character of the film with his early attempts to trick Sally into bed and later with his self destructive behaviour when he believes he has lost her.

Although Murray and von Stroheim really can’t be beat for on-set tantrum stories, Gilbert had his own minor strop when his director told him he was dancing like an oaf during the famous waltz scene and the actor walked off. According to daughter Leatrice’s biography, Jack was tracked down by Murray, who was in the middle of changing costume and ran off in only a pair of shoes and a hat to find him. It was Murray who had lobbied for Gilbert as Prince Danilo in the first place, and she wasn’t going to let a pesky thing like being stark naked stop her from bringing back her leading man. Gilbert of course went back for an apology from von Stroheim and the waltz scene is one of the most famous moments in silent film.

Here is a review of The Merry Widow, from Photoplay magazine, 1925.

‘Unless the spectacle of John Gilbert in twenty dashing uniforms has dazzled us into utter incompetency, this is one of those fatal pictures that is going to cause untold havoc. The adaptation of Franz Lehar's great light opera is successful beyond the most glowing hopes, and it has so much gay beauty, high romance and brilliant spectacle that you can scarcely believe it is the work of the same Erich von Stroheim who directed the sordid Greed. Certainly he seemed to be right at home when he set forth the most sophisticated love story ever presented on the screen. There are moments in the picture that are either going to kill or cure the censors. But most of them are redeemed by a fine strain of romance the first time that Von Stroheim has ever caught this illusive quality.

‘But best of all there is John Gilbert in a role that ought to make him the greatest of them all. Gilbert is not only a Gift to the Girls but he has qualities that redeem him for the men. There is, for instance, the scene in which he crowns the weakling crown prince with a vase. And he knows how to act, too; his Prince Danilo is a human being. However, let's rush on and say some nice things about Mae Murray. Hers, too, is a fine performance; well shaded, deftly drawn and, above all, bewitching to the eye. As a matter of fact, Miss Murray is largely responsible for the picture in its production and had to fight her director every inch of the way to its finish. Another magnificent performance is given by Roy D'Arcy. As for the waltz scene, it is one of those lyric moments you'll never forget.

‘However, just one more word. Tell the children if they go to The Merry Widow, Santa Claus won't bring them anything for Christmas. But don't miss it yourself.’

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The Big Parade According to Jack

2006-04-20T08:03:00.000+01:00

Here's a snippet Gilbert wrote about his experience making The Big Parade.

In the late 1920s Jack wrote a series of installments for Photoplay magazine on his life story and the one I've found (as quoted in Kevin Brownlow's book The War, The West, and The Wilderness; p 191) is titled Jack Gilbert Writes His Own Story, from the magazine's Sept. 1928 issue:

"The Big Parade. A thrill when I wrote the words. The Big Parade! As a preface to my remarks pertaining to this great film, permit me to become maudlin. No love has ever enthralled me as did the making of this picture. No achievement will ever excite me so much... No reward will ever be so great as having been a part of The Big Parade. It was a high point of my career. All that has followed is balderdash...

"[The picture] was to be my first starring vehicle for MGM. A little six-reel movie of the war, but something more behind it. Thalberg was the first to sense an underlying greatness in our story, which imbued Vidor and the rest of us with a knowledge of our responsibility. The camera was set up; Slim, Bull and Jim, caked with mud, were to plunge into a water-filled shell hole to escape an enemy's fire. It was the first scene to be photographed. As I was adjusting my gas-mask, King approached, his hand outstretched. Through a grin, he uttered prophetic words, the ultimate apsiration for movie makers, 'Grauman's Egyptian, baby.'

"Sequence after sequence was good. We knew it. There was no doubt in our minds, nor any display of ego. The chewing gum episode with little Renee Adoree. Only a suggestion was offered in the script, and no one really knew what would happen. Cameras started and away we went. Minute after minute; impromptu; inspired; both Renee and me, guided by some unseen power, expressing beauty. And when the film was exhausted, old Pop Vidor, age 30, murmuring 'I'll be damned if I ever saw a scene as good as that.'

"The shell hole scene with the German soldier boy. The only thing known about it being 'Jim offers him a cigarette.' And when it was over, Pop's question 'Do you think you slapped him too many times?'

"And my hysterical reply 'God, no, I felt it.'

"And King 'If you felt it, it's right.'"

Nice to 'hear' Gilbert's voice, even if the piece has been written for a fan magazine. As far as I know, this series is the closest Gilbert ever came to producing any sort of autobiography. (This wasn't abnormal, however, very few movie actors produced much in the way of writing. But if you want to see Douglas Fairbanks' book Laugh and Live go to Sunrise Silents, a wonderful site that serves as a sort of silent movie library source. The book is, to a modern audience, hilarious in its down-homey advice!)

Sunrise Silents Home Page

The Big Parade

2006-04-05T10:23:00.000+01:00

The Big Parade [1925] Dir. King Vidor. Starring John Gilbert, Renee Adoree, Karl Dane.

In 1925 John Gilbert’s star was on the up. He had had successes in a number of films including Cameo Kirby (1923), His Hour (1924), He Who Gets Slapped (1924), and The Merry Widow (1925) and was fast becoming Valentino‘s most serious rival for the female audience's affections. He had moved from villain roles to romantic leads with great success by the time he began work on The Big Parade (1925), the film that would not only be the greatest achievement of Gilbert’s career but is still today a high-water mark for the silent era of cinema. Gilbert gives the performance of a lifetime - a million lifetimes - touching and hauntingly effective in an all-round outstanding film directed by the great King Vidor. It is a powerful depiction of the Great War made by and for the generation who had lived through it.

The film came into being when Vidor decided he wanted to make a film that would resonate with audiences and play more than the usual week most feature films generally lasted in theatres at the time. ‘I went to Thalberg’ Vidor remembered in an interview in the 1970s, ‘and said “I want to make a film that runs longer, six months or three months.” He said, “do you have any ideas?” And out came The Big Parade. All war stories up to that time had been ones that glamorized war. My idea… was not to glamorize war, but to just have a GI, a common soldier who didn’t want to make war. He didn’t think enough against it to start a campaign against the war but he still felt pretty badly about it.’

The screenplay for The Big Parade originated, as many other plays and films about the Great War, from a veteran’s memoir. Screenwriter Harry Behn based the film on Plumes, the semi-autobiographical novel from writer Laurence Stallings. Stallings had also written What Price Glory?, the WWI epic that was playing on Broadway at the time and would be filmed twice over the following thirty years. Behn and MGM Head of Production Irving Thalberg met with Stallings in New York and the story goes that the screenplay was written from the writer’s drunken ramblings on the train trip back to Hollywood.

Production on The Big Parade began and John Gilbert was cast as Jim Apperson, the son of a wealthy mill-owner. At first, both Vidor and Gilbert were pretty well equally unenthused about working together - Vidor didn’t want an actor whom he considered a pretty boy matinee idol and Gilbert, living up to Vidor’s stereotype, was wary about being on screen not only without makeup, but crawling around in the mud! (Gilbert’s daughter, Leatrice, denies this rumour in her father’s biography, but the story has appeared in many other works since then. It may be a quality in Gilbert‘s character that can only be left to speculation now.)

Jim is introduced to the audience in a funny scene in which he is getting a shave at the barbar shop. He’s lying in the chair, towel around his face with only that big nose of his peeking out, making statements about his refusal to work, no matter what Dad says. Jim is rich, lazy, and spoiled and when war is declared by President Wilson he only gets swept into the action because his girlfriend thinks he'll look ‘gorgeous’ in a uniform.

Our hero gets to France and falls in with Bull and Slim, two working class guys who are more than a bit on the crude side. Physically, the three actors are a perfect trio. Gilbert as Jim is handsome and a bit on the willowy side. Bull (Tom O’Brien) is short and fat with a squashed face and Slim (Karl Dane) is a lanky giant forever chewing tobacco. There is an easy comic relationship between the three men through the first part of the film and a mismatched but desperate reliance on each other when they go to battle in the second half. The development of their friendship is steady, understated and really touching in a few scenes (especially a later scene, in which they pass around their cigarettes waiting for battle - you can see how they depend on each other and there is an easy bond between them).

But before that Jim meets Melisande (Renee Adoree), a French girl from the nearby village. The two quickly fall in love and the romantic scenes between Jim and Melisande provide some of the most beautiful moments of the movie.

Gilbert is great as an American boy trying to woo a French girl and I think his efforts work better here in a silent film than they ever could with sound. The two characters can’t communicate through speech anyway and, being a silent film actor, Gilbert is truly inventive in expressing his ideas visually. He is clumsily endearing as he tries to put his arm around Melisande while she slaps it away, and he drops more than a few clangers when he tries to tease Melisande, picking up a frog and saying ‘froggy - you froggy’ and laughing at his own joke. He is adorably puppyish and Adoree sweet and earthy and the on-screen pairing is fresh and full of energy. Adoree, unlike Greta Garbo, another of Gilbert’s frequent leading ladies, isn’t remote. She is present and accounted for, as if you could reach out and touch her, even 80 years on, and moves within her surroundings rather than float ethereally through them as a form of light and darkness. A good match for Gilbert who had very much the same qualities.

The best example of this, of course, is the heartbreaking scene in which Jim is called to the front and the two are desperately searching for each other amidst the marching men and cheering villagers. Jim spots Melisande just as he is about to be carted off to battle and rushes to kiss her. It’s a powerful scene and much of it is due to Gilbert’s acting - he cries as he kisses her, strokes her hair, and while kissing her fingers looks over his shoulder like a sorry hound at the officer shouting at him to get back in the truck. As he climbs in Melisande tries to pull him back out and gives the officer a good wallop when he tries to stop her. Love truly has no pride as she wraps herself around Jim’s leg and is dragged behind the truck as it drives away. In the end she is left with just his shoe and his promise ‘remember - I’ll be back’, crumpled with grief in the middle of the dusty road.

Now begins the second half of the film - and the spectacular battle scenes. Jim has just left the loving arms of Melisande for the mud, gas and mechanized horrors of modern warfare. Vidor took particular care in creating a realistic feel for these scenes. It is in the brutality of the battle that The Big Parade’s anti-war message can be found. It's the palpable fear in the famous march through the woods, Jim’s disbelief that his officers would send his men into the mess of machine gunfire and mustard gas, and the final realization that whatever reasons he had for joining the war weren’t worth the costs he saw around him.

Jim, Bull, and Slim are marched to the site where the big battle will take place and cautiously enter the woods. The men walk slowly through the trees, marching to an unknown fate in one of the most famous scenes of the film. Vidor based the walk on a piece of footage he saw of an army coffin being ceremoniously taken out. ‘It was a rhythm of suspended animation and their movement that suggested an event. There was no sound track, but the whole pattern spelled death…If I could duplicate this slow, measured cadence as my American troops approached the frontline I could illustrate the proximity of death with a telling and powerful effect.’ Vidor used a metronome and to create a slow cadence for the soldiers to march and fall to. Even the German sniper who is shot from the tree falls in time with the cadence. Vidor called it a 'bloody ballet, a ballet of death’. As they move forward, the full horror of the battle comes in to view.

The scenes of battle in The Big Parade are spectacular. There's no need for any sort of qualifier about being good for the technology and film techniques available in the 1920s. They hold their awe-inspiring own next to any of the most sophisticated stunts and computer graphics of today. They have the quality of a newsreel of unequalled footage and access to the First World War. Vidor and his crew perfectly capture the hellish quality of flashing explosions, poisonous gas and burnt out trees that characterise the image we have today of the Great War.

It is in the midst of this carnage that we get another of the celebrated scenes of the film. Slim and Bull have been killed and Jim goes on a rampage, hurling grenades at the German gunmen. He is hit in the knee and, writhing in the mud, comes face to face with a German soldier. Jim crawls pathetically after him and drags him in to a shell hole where he believes he’s going to finish him off. But he can’t - he looks too closely into the soldier’s face and pulls away. He sees the German is dying and lifts his helmet to pull out the last cigarette he would have shared with Slim and Bull and gives it to the dying soldier. Gilbert perfectly captures a mixture of rage and shame, as he tries to pound the German’s face with his fists but can only manage a sorry slap. Any anti-war message that The Big Parade might claim is found in this scene. The hatred Jim had felt toward the soldier becomes suddenly meaningless when he realizes they are both men - they are the same - and that neither side wins the war, they both lose. This scene would, of course, appear again in All Quiet on the Western Front five years later.

Jim does return home the victor, but a broken man. He doesn't fit in at home anymore and he has lost a leg. (A brave move to show this on screen in 1925. Louis B. Mayer worried the public would find it distasteful, not to mention the negative reaction Gilbert might get from his female fans - there was a time when Mayer actually protected Gilbert's career rather than sabotage it. An alternate ending was shot, but never used). Only Jim’s mother understands that he cannot go home again - and sends him off to find Melisande.

Vidor and MGM were actually worried about dropping this masterpiece on the public. Vidor thought the film might have to be shown in tents if the army protested the anti-war message. At the premiere Gilbert was said to have gnawed his fingernails to the nubs - the film had come to mean a lot to him and everyone involved. There was a aura about the production that something important was being created - Thalberg had even taken a special interest in its production. He saw that a good film was in the making and increased its budget and insisted on retakes to make what would have been a good film a great one.

In the end, of course, the film was embraced by audiences and lasted not only a week, or a few months, but two years across America and parts of Europe and was hailed as one of the great works of art in the cinema. It was one of the biggest money-makers of the decade and the like would not be seen again until Gone With the Wind in 1939. According to Fountain, Gilbert cried, flew over the moon, and got steaming drunk after the ecstacies of the reviews he recieved for his work in this film.

Film critic Robert Sherwood wrote; ‘The Big Parade is a marvellous picture that can be ranked among the few genuinely great achievements of the screen. He [Vidor] has made war scenes that actually resemble war…When he advances a raw company of infantry through a forest which is raked by machine-gun fire, he makes the soldiers look scared, sick at their stomachs, with no heart for the ghastly business that is ahead. He has shown an American soldier, suddenly wild with the desire to kill, trying to jab his bayonet into the neck of a dying German sniper. He has shown the look on that sniper’s face and the horrible revulsion that overcomes the American boy. I doubt there is a single irregular soldier, volunteered or conscripted, who did not experience that same awful feeling during his career in France…who did not recognize the impulse to withdraw the bayonet and offer the dying Heinie a cigarette?’

Time magazine wrote a similar review on Nov. 30, 1925:

'The Big Parade. Easily the greatest war picture, one of the greatest of all pictures, has been written by Laurence Stallings (coauthor of What Price Glory); directed by King Vidor; and principally played by John Gilbert and Renee Adoree. It is the story of a rich man's son, a riveter and a bartender in the trenches, and the French girl that the first of these three married. It has humor, terror and bewildering beauty. It has one of the most exciting stories ever filmed, direction unexcelled, and truth and brilliancy of acting. The Big Parade is the one film since The Covered Wagon that men, women and children must not miss.'

Not all critics were so favourable (British film critics understandably disliked the implication that it was the Americans who did all the fighting) but those who recognized the film in its true context - one that set new heights of honesty and artistry to which cinema could now reach - realized they were dealing with an important film. The Big Parade can be counted today as a landmark in the development of the medium and, in particular, what sort of depths a film could delve into the understanding of war and humanity. A vital cinematic experience for anyone claiming to have an interest in film.

Much of the information in this review was found in Leatrice Fountain's book Dark Star: The Meteoric Rise and Fall of John Gilbert, and film historian Andrew Kelly's book Cinema and the Great War.