Sing and Like It (1934)

Director: William A Seiter
Stars: Zasu Pitts, Pert Kelton, Edward Everett Horton, Nat Pendleton and Ned Sparks

Sing and Like It is a great example of just why Hollywood had a golden age. People mistakenly assume that the golden age meant an abundance of classic films that people can still watch and admire today. Such pictures do exist but the golden age was much more. It came at a time when everyone went to the movies and they didn't just see one film, they saw an A picture, a B movie, a cartoon, a newsreel, a whole bunch of stuff all on the same bill. The industry was dominated by the major studios who cranked out pictures in vast numbers to fill these slots, some only taking a week to make. The point is that many of these routine programmers, like Sing and Like It, that had no expectations beyond persuading a few more punters into a few more theatres, should really suck. The realisation that they rarely did begins a real understanding of the golden age.

The reason Sing and Like It doesn't suck is because the people who made it, both in front of and behind the camera, were talented people and there were many more talented people waiting in the wings to take over if they faltered. It's the consistent depth of that talent across such a huge volume of pictures that made the golden age. There weren't actually as many truly great movies as people remember, but the routine stuff was so much better than the routine stuff of today. In many instances, the routine stuff is actually better than the good stuff of today. As produced by Merian C Cooper, a year after King Kong, and shot by reliable comedy director William A Seiter, this one focuses on five actors, four of which are favourites of mine: the delightfully ditzy Zasu Pitts; the grand ditherer, Edward Everett Horton; the gloriously dry Ned Sparks; and, in a bigger part than usual, ever lovable Nat Pendleton. The fifth is sardonic vaudevillian Pert Kelton.

Pendleton, so frequently just one of the gang backing up Cagney, Robinson, Bogart or whoever, finally gets a gang of his own. He's T Fenimore 'Fenny' Sylvester, a name that surely destined him to either run the show or have it run him. Here he's very much in charge, aiming to expand his kidnapping racket to cracking safes, but he's still a big kid at heart with a strong attachment to his mother. This leads him to finance a musical show, of all things, because he hears Annie Snodgrass singing about her mother and he's instantly and memorably smitten. She's practicing with the Union Bank Little Theatre Players, while he's robbing her employer, but he has to take a break to discover who the angel was whose voice is drifting upstairs to him. He makes her sing Your Mother again, in front of his rogues gallery of hoods and there are no dry eyes in the house. The catch is that only his are tears of joy; his men are notably suffering.

In the precode era, a few genres dominated the screen and musicals and gangster flicks were two of the key ones, so it's only natural that RKO would merge the two together in a comedy that sends up the whole thing. Pendleton was a natural to head up the gangster half and Zasu Pitts is an inspired choice to lampoon the musicals. She plays Annie Snodgrass with delightful snobbery, a bank employee in Drafts and Collections who 'doesn't think of anything but her art any more.' I have no idea which keys she sings in but I know it's more than one and her lyrics couldn't be any more schmaltzy. 'Who taught you wrong from right,' she trills in a quavery voice, 'while holding you so tight? Who misses you tonight? Your mother!' It's an awful performance in the best ways and having Pendleton all doe eyed over it is comedy gold. Never mind that his moll, Ruby, aches to be back on stage and he doesn't like the idea, he has to gift Annie Snodgrass to the world.

This is fluff, pure and simple, but it's elevated by the cast. Zasu Pitts made a number of serious films in the silent era, especially for Erich von Stroheim, but she was always a comedienne and talkies gave her opportunities to use her memorable voice that silent pictures never could. Nat Pendleton was an Olympic wrestler who played as many dumb oxen in the thirties as Karl Dane did in the twenties, but he did so in a quintessentially American way, playing cops, gangsters or wrestlers who could always be relied on to be taken advantage of, from the very best films to the very worst (think The Thin Man at one end and Swing Your Lady at the other). Pendleton gets more opportunity here than Pitts, because for the most part if she's on screen she's singing Your Mother yet again, a song that's hilarious to hear once but painful to hear again. Sylvester failing to understand that is a running joke but the joke is on us.

There are no star turns here, as each member of the ensemble cast gets their moment in the spotlight, even down to the bit part players. The thing to realise is that the cast were all known as character actors for a reason. None of them dominate the story, not only because the script doesn't aim for them to but because that isn't who they are. They're the folks who we watch in other people's movies and want to see more of, only to find that when they get their own movies they can't carry them on their own. So here, none of them are tasked with more than what they do best: building characters out of scraps of situation, then bouncing dialogue off each other with panache. That works right down to John Qualen's brief spot as Annie's boyfriend, Oswald, who with few lines and little screen time paints a complex portrait of their relationship. He'll obviously be there for her whatever, though she sees him and her as secondary to her art.

Best of all is Ned Sparks as Fenny's right hand man, Toots McGuire, whose dry wit takes full advantage of the script but goes far beyond it. His talent was to wring the highest comedic value out of the shortest lines. 'Let it go,' he says to his boss and it's genius. 'Goody,' he mutters and it carries blistering depth. Often he doesn't even have to open his mouth to be funny. On the other hand, Edward Everett Horton always made the most of his lines and the more words the better. He's perfect for the role of Adam Frink, the best show producer in town. 'Did you ever hear such a voice?' Fenny asks him about Annie. 'Not emanating from a human throat,' he replies. His futile attempts to say no to the gangster are glorious. Inevitably, Frink is caught up as helplessly in the plot as Annie, with Sylvester's love of his mother driving the whole thing and with Oswald and Toots hanging in there to pick up the inevitable pieces.

It's Ruby who shakes it up. Unhappy that she isn't the star of the show, she persuades Fenny to make her Annie's understudy, with the firm intention of stealing the lead through any nefarious means necessary. When Fenny decides to stage a publicity stunt by kidnapping Annie, Ruby has her kidnapped from the kidnappers, and by that point the story is rolling along with a life of its own. Like the rest, she's gifted with clever dialogue. 'From now on we're sisters under the skin,' she informs Annie, 'and you're already under mine.' In fact every combination of the five leads works delightfully. Toots translates everyone else's dialogue to Fenny who can only understand underworld slang. Fenny effortlessly and constantly annoys Frink. Ruby plays Fenny and plays up to Annie. Frink attempts in vain to give stage directions to his leading lady who doesn't have a clue but believes she's a consummate professional.

And I can't keep away from the writing. Adapted from a story by Aben Kandel by Marion Dix and Laird Doyle, just another couple of Hollywood scriptwriters, this was never meant to be anything special, just another routine programmer aimed to fill a scheduling slot. Yet it contains sparkling dialogue that makes the running time a swift 72 minutes; and it includes subtle commentary like the characters who write their reviews based on the reaction of the esteemed critic Abercrombie Hancock rather than the show itself, a neat take on The Emperor's New Clothes. Sure, there are flaws. There are far too many renditions of Your Mother and far too little else for Zasu Pitts to do. With so many cast members to focus on, we end up focusing on none of them. But if made today this would be an Annie Snodgrass of a picture, a clunker that expected a $50m budget. In 1934 it was a Toots McGuire, without any expectations at all but with all the talent in the world.

Smarty (1934)

Director: William A Seiter
Stars: Joan Blondell, Warren William, Edward Everett Horton, Frank McHugh and Claire Dodd

Based on a play by F Hugh Herbert, this is one of those films that highlights just how far we have changed as a society in such a short time. If you can believe this, the message behind Smarty is not just that domestic abuse is fine and dandy but it's actually the key to a successful marriage. Happiness can be found by husbands not being afraid to slap their wives when they deserve it and wives understanding that it's needed to keep them in line. Oh, and it's a comedy. Can you imagine the outcry if such a film was released today? Well Warner Bros snuck this one in as the shadow of the Production Code was descending, a mere month and a half before far more than wife slapping would become beyond the pale. Don't be mistaken that the code aimed to protect women though. It crippled female characters on screen by removing what code administrators saw as moral depravity and placing women back in the kitchen where they belonged.

Regardless of the message, Smarty has a female lead who is strong and dynamic, precisely the sort of character who would promptly disappear from Hollywood movies when enforcement of the code began on 1st July, 1934. She's Vicki Wallace and she's celebrating her birthday as the film begins. As you might expect in the hands of Joan Blondell, Vicki is fascinating to watch but she's also utterly unfuriating, her hobbies apparently being to wind up her husband every way she can and to ruthlessly manoeuvre everything to her own benefit. Her husband Tony is played by Warren William and it's truly shocking to see him wrapped around someone else's finger. This may be a Warren William picture, but Joan Blondell is bizarrely playing the Warren William part. I'm sure that's the point. While William is unjustly forgotten today, audiences of the time knew and loved the bad boy of the precodes and would have understood exactly what was going on.

For a start, even though Tony is a thoughtful husband and has a pleasant birthday evening all planned out, Vicki invites Vernon Thorpe over to play bridge, knowing full well that her husband can't stand him. Their fourth is Nita, Thorpe's guest, and hanging around for comic relief is their neighbour, George Lancaster. We don't get to see a lot of cards, we get to see Vicki torment her husband shamelessly, winding up him up throughout until he breaks down and slaps her. The reactions are amazing. Tony is horrified at what he's done, unable to forgive himself for such a cruel act, even though he was totally driven to it. Nita enjoys it. While she doesn't excuse Tony's action, she freely admits that his wife is annoying and she explains to her date that 'a good sock in the eye is something every woman needs, once in her life'. Thorpe is appalled, which is easy to visualise given that he's played by Edward Everett Horton, who knew that reaction well.

It all makes for a surreal scene. Joan Blondell torments Warren William, even though we would expect the exact opposite. William is ashamed of his action, something we never thought we'd see. Witnessing an act of violence against a woman, another woman wittily approves while a lawyer is appalled. The only part that seems familiar is the humour, given that Frank McHugh is George Lancaster, breezing in and out of rooms and conversations just as we expect him to. Of course humour in this situation is of itself surreal. Well, while we're off balance, the story decides to keep us there, because whatever lesson Vicki and Tony should have learned from the incident is not learned and Vicki escalates instead. She demands an end to their marriage, hires Vernon Thorpe as her divorce attorney and promptly marries him as soon as she's a free woman. He's always loved her, it seems, so there's no possible conflict of interest there.

By this point, you probably won't be too surprised to find that Vicki continues being infuriating, merely tormenting Vernon instead of Tony. After waiting a year, she mixes them back together, inviting Tony over to dinner, calling him darling and pursuing him unashamedly while he keeps asking, 'How's Vernon?' in vain. Watching these shenanigans, I started keeping track of just how precode this movie was. When you think about it, it's astoundingly outrageous, with absolutely nothing viable for release a couple of months later. A wife spurs her husband into abuse so she marry her divorce lawyer, then repeats the action with him so she can leave her new husband for her old husband, who's seeing a married woman. Sure, it sounds like a random soap opera episode today, but in 1935 the Legion of Decency would have had kittens. The only way it could possibly even be released was to make it onto screens in 1934 before the code was enforced.

It ends up too strangely against type to fully work. Joan Blondell is capable in the Warren William role, not a usual place for her, but one that provides her with plenty of opportunity to dominate. William has fun being the recipient of this treatment for a change but it's not right for him. There are a few moments when the old William shines through anyway, such as when he arrives at her party and looks at her in a new, very revealing dress. He does get better as the picture runs on, especially once Vernon shows up and proves totally at unease, but it's unusual territory for him that he can't be comfortable in. Horton is a weasel of a divorce lawyer, which means he's doing his job right. It's good to see an edge on the bewilderment that didn't always get the chance to manifest itself. Claire Dodd radiates joy as a much divorced woman, though she's underused in this film. Frank McHugh, of course, could do this sort of thing in his sleep.

As to the plot, there is precedence to the violence and it's even explained in the film, as another knowing nod to the end of the precode era. The source play opened in 1927 so had no idea what was around the corner in the thirties, but the adaptation was by the playwright himself, working with Carl Erickson, who would ironically kill himself only a year later after receiving a letter from his wife asking him for a divorce. Vernon Thorpe calls Tony's slapping of Vicki 'extreme cruelty', enough on its own to guarantee divorce, which it promptly does. Without seeking justification, Tony later explains that he'd been going to the movies a lot, and discovered that girls apparently love to be hit, even with grapefruit, a reference to Jimmy Cagney and Mae Clarke in The Public Enemy. In the precodes, where men were gangsters and women were prostitutes, it was hardly the worst crime in play, but this commentary seems out of place.

This scene almost feels like an apology to the public on behalf of the filmmaking community, a reinforcement that just because actors do things on screen doesn't mean you should copy them at home. It's half hearted and inappropriate, even before it schizophrenically proceeds to push the concept that hitting women is absolutely something you should copy because your marriage would benefit from it! This inconsistency of approach seems fraudulent rather than careless, for it's carefully scripted otherwise. Both Tony and Vernon are immediately horrified by what they do, while Vicki literally asks for it and Nita is all for it too. What it really boils down to is a couple of men writing this story as if it was advice from women. Hitting your wife is fine, these female characters tell us, as long as you love her. Only if you don't is it offensive. A woman even gets the last word, reinforcing the concept. She says, 'Hit me again.' Wow.

Village of the Giants (1965)

Director: Bert I Gordon
Stars: Tommy Kirk, Johnny Crawford and Ronny Howard

Bert I Gordon introduced giants to the late fifties monster movies with The Cyclops, then made them a staple with The Amazing Colossal Man and its sequel, War of the Colossal Beast. Every other filmmaker in the country followed suit, or at least it felt like they did, but he took a break for a while, from human giants at least, until 1965's Village of the Giants, a bizarre mashup of genres that mixed monster movies with beach movies, Disney movies and juvenile delinquent movies. It was loosely based on the H G Wells novel Food of the Gods, which Gordon adapted a little more faithfully in 1976. This version is so loose that Wells would probably have turned in his grave. As it turns out, it's a terrible picture, even by Mr BIG's usual standards, but the cast is one to pay attention to. Some are still notably recognisable today but back in 1965 many were household names which was, of course, entirely the point.

The story comes from two directions: the gang of rebellious youths and the child prodigy. The gang arrive by crashing their car into a telephone pole in the rain. So dangerous that they react by climbing out and boogieing on down in the mud while getting drenched, these four girls and four boys end up in one huge mud bath. They're led by Beau Bridges as Freddie, a particularly insipid and pasty white gang leader, certainly no competition for Marlon Brando or James Dean but not really in the same league as Mugs from the East Side Kids either. A downed street sign gives him the idea to go torment folks in Hainesville, only three miles away, a peaceful town in which our leads, Mike and Nancy, smooch away the night on the couch, attempting to ignore the kid cooking up chemistry experiments in his basement lab. He's Little Ronny Howard, back in his days as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show, subtly named Genius and he's the real foil for Freddie.

Names are hardly a strong point for this picture. One explosion later and Genius invents Goo, a bubbly red concoction that the cat laps up and grows to humungous size in no time at all. This is why Tommy Kirk plays Mike, because he'd dealt with eccentric scientific wizards for Disney in The AbsentMinded Professor and its sequel Son of Flubber earlier in the decade, when he was a child actor. He's supposed to be the film's star but he's outshone by a giant cat, a giant dog and especially by a giant pair of ducks that shake their tail feathers at the local hop after he feeds them Goo. He's a poor leading man, reminiscent of Wil Wheaton after he lost his juvenile charm but before he gained his adult character. Thus he proudly announces to the town that they're his ducks and he has a million dollar secret. Yeah, what a great idea that was! At least his integrity is up to shrugging off attempts by one of Freddie's girls to seduce it out of him.

The hop is where everyone first meets, because there's dancing every two pages in this script and Mr BIG hired the Beau Brummels to play live for these kids. They get two songs and continue playing even when the ducks take over the floor. That's how grounded in reality this picture is. No wonder Freddie's hooligans say things like, 'This place is really groovy.' To be fair, they're talking about the local theatre, which is off season and closed, but which conveniently leaves a host of costumes and props around for them to play with. I'm sure you won't be too surprised to find that as the local youth parties on down in the square with Mike's giant ducks skewered and cooked for them, Freddie and his gang break into Genius's basement lab, obtain some Goo and dare each other into growing to giant size and becoming the monsters in this monster movie. Unfortunately they're about as monstrous as they are delinquent, which is to say not very.

Village of the Giants is purest exploitation, as if Genius had thrown everything that kids dug at the time into a couple of test tubes and brewed up a single potion to make them all deliriously happy. Unfortunately it turns out to be an unholy mess of genres, as incoherent and overdone as any three of AIP's beach movies put together, with even more booty shaking and safe for work exposed flesh. Beyond the Beau Brummels, Mike Clifford croons a number and Freddy Cannon gets to perform a song in his cardigan. Something for everyone, remember? The biggest musical name though is Toni Basil, not as a performer but as the film's choreographer and an extra who doesn't say much but may get more screen time than anyone else. She's a dancer at the hop, shimmying at scary speed in a cage and she's a dancing distraction at a key point in the story. She's unimaginatively named Red because she spends most of the film in a bikini and a red wig.

In some ways it outdoes each of the genres it steals from, but not in any satisfying way. On the beach movie front, it has a bevy of girls who are highly pleasing to the eye, though Joy Harmon's extreme coppertone makes her look like she'd eaten something orange at Willy Wonka's. As a monster movie, it has a whole teen gang of giants, but they use their newfound dominance to demand that the sheriff bring them fried chicken and impose a curfew of 9.00pm for adults. As a gang movie it's pathetic, Freddie and his followers settling for being happy that nobody will ask for their IDs or they won't get hit by their fathers any more. They have as much imagination as the folks who named the characters. Only on the Disney movie front does it really satisfy, as it maintains the Disney feel but adds the sort of edge that Disney wouldn't dare to dream of. OK, that just means double entendres, switchblades and giant cleavage, but it's something.

Anyone paying attention can see so many opportunities for that edge to be edgier. For instance, the gang grow to giant size but their clothes don't. This was 1965 so we were hardly going to get slasher style booby shots, but the opportunity to enhance the sexual tension was wasted. Having them fashion clothes out of the theatre curtains makes sense, but a giant Beau Bridges in a red toga with tassels doesn't help us buy into his supposed toughness. The most memorable scene is when giant Merrie picks up normal sized Horsey (yeah, Horsey) and dangles him from her bra. That made some of the posters, but its promise isn't met. Similarly, there's one potentially scary scene, with a giant spider in a basement, but it's the only one and it's drained of menace by bad effects and poor editing. The gang of giants are drained of menace too, not least by having them appear in slow motion in every scene. The townsfolk just look at them for the most part.

The effects could have been much better but they could have been a lot worse too. Mostly they hinder the film because Gordon was obviously aware of the limitations. For instance, the normal size folks take down Freddie at one point with the aid of a collection of hot rods and ropes, but they do so by driving around a couple of motionless poles made up to look like his legs. What this means is that Beau Bridges has to stand there like a moron, flailing around a little in slow motion, while he's taken down because it's the only way the logistics could work. The last fight scene has the same problem, a David vs Goliath battle with sling vs pipe, because the budget didn't allow for effects capable enough for Kirk and Bridges to really go at it. As we notice this though, we also realise that it wouldn't have helped. Having the money to do it right wouldn't have made the slightest difference, because the biggest flaw is the writing and it's a fatal flaw.

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)

Director: Nathan Hertz
Stars: Allison Hayes and William Hudson

When The Amazing Colossal Man did so well at the box office in 1957 for Bert I Gordon, it was surely no surprise to find other filmmakers promptly cashing in on its success with similar films. The one I remember most fondly from my youth was Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, made a year later by Woolner Brothers (no, not Warner Brothers), with a female lead, clad in appropriately draped bedsheets to keep her modest. Made for $88,000, it grossed well over five times that, enough to prompt sequel discussions, in colour and with a much higher budget, but it never got past the script stage. Unfortunately it isn't that great a film. Perhaps my fond memory of it was enhanced by the poster, which is one of the greatest and most subtly sexual movie posters ever made. The artist was Reynold Brown, who was reponsible for many great exploitation posters such as Creature from the Black Lagoon, I Was a Teenage Werewolf and This Island Earth.

While the poster and the title advertise this as a monster movie, it takes a long while for Allison Hayes to grow to her huge and stunningly inconsistent size. For the most part it's a movie about normal sized monsters, of the cheating variety. 'Harry, what would your wife say?' asks Honey Parker of her boyfriend Harry Archer as we begin. His wife, to whom he's returned after a brief separation, entirely so he can get his hands on some of her fifty million bucks, says 'Aaah!' but not why you think. There's a science fiction component here: 'a strange red fireball' comes out of the sky while she's driving down Route 66 and lands in front of her, like Rover from The Prisoner. A giant emerges to reach for the diamond around her neck. It simply isn't Nancy Archer's day: she has to deal both with a cheating lowlife husband and a giant from outer space. Of course not a soul believes her because they know that she's spent time in a private sanitarium.

Allison Hayes was a regular in genre pictures of the fifties and sixties, not just horror movies like The Undead, Zombies of Mora Tau and The Crawling Hand, but also westerns, films noir and spy flicks. The poster for this film is an undoubted highlight of her career but the character itself was unfortunately not quite what it should have been. As Nancy Archer, she's a rich woman dealing with her love for a man who doesn't deserve it, shamelessly cavorting with mercenary blonde Honey Parker in a small town where everyone surely knew everyone else. In another film she'd have shot him dead or conjured up the forces of evil to take care of him, but here she flounders around until she's contaminated by alien radiation and she becomes the fifty foot woman of the title. Only now does she feel safe in dealing with Harry, by reversing the iconic shot from King Kong, the giant woman reaching through the window for the normal sized gorilla.

Initially the story builds neatly as a B movie melodrama and it had all the potential to become a feminist landmark, but it loses its way. While Archer flounces around with her feelings instead of doing something about them, Yvette Vickers has no such restraint as Honey Parker. She's a sleazy piece of work from moment one, cuddling up with another woman's husband in public and needling him to bump her off for the money. She does it blisteringly well: she's a dynamo and she knows how to walk the walk and talk the talk, sashaying and pressuring in equal measure. No wonder Stephen King ranked her as one of his matinée idols. Like Hayes, she made a number of genre pictures: Reform School Girl and I, Mobster preceded this one, and Attack of the Giant Leeches would arrive in 1959, a year after being a Playmate of the Month. The pair work well as opposites: one wishywashy and emotional, the other ruthless and determined.

The script should have had them face off against each other for more than just a single lopsided, albeit satisfying, scene. Hayes and Vickers both had the looks and the acting chops to make it a battle to relish over an hour and a bit of running time. Sure, the alien radiation could have given Hayes the edge but the battle should have been raging for a long while before that ever became a factor. Instead they fail to even connect, possibly not even sharing a scene until the finalé, so we're stuck with Harry instead as the connection between the two. William Hudson is capable as Harry Archer, but nothing more. We don't like him, for sure, but he doesn't have the charisma to make us truly despise him as we should. 'You're all I have,' his wife tells him, in her mansion with her devoted butler and world famous Star of India diamond. Everything should have been there for us to hate him with a passion, like a great wrestling heel, but he's too inconsequential.

In fact the easiest male character to focus on is Sheriff Dubbitt's deputy Charlie, played by Frank Chase in his last year in the movie business. Credited in less than half his movies, this was still his 25th of 26 pictures, and he's as much a bundle of dim witted energy as Hayes is a bundle of nerves. A small town cop in every way, Charlie is still much more noticeable than his boss, who is simply in the picture, and more than any of the male actors up to the lead. William Hudson is here presumably because he'd played the doctor in The Amazing Colossal Man, as it can never hurt to steal some of the cast from the movie you're ripping off. Yet even when about to murder his wife with an overdose, we're still thinking about Deputy Charlie dancing with Honey down at Tony's Bar and Grill. Other actors like Ray Gordon or Otto Waldis do exactly as they're expected but nothing more. It's sad when the small town deputy dominates the male cast.

What surprised me most was how much buildup this story had before the fit hits the shan. There is suspense, this monster movie being far more carefully plotted than most, but there are no real surprises. It's pulp stuff, right down to the spaceship the sheriff and the butler end up on, with its glass fishbowls with suspended diamonds. How the thirty foot bald, translucent, alien giant fits in this normal sized spaceship I have no idea, with or without his crusader costume, but scale is off consistently here. The story really is a deadly B movie melodrama with a dollop of sci-fi until the very end, when the giant Nancy wakes up and tears off the roof to wreak violent revenge on her husband. It's satisfying to urge on the monster for good reason, not only because the good guys are so annoying. The ending is the wish fulfilment fantasy for victimised women that the whole of the movie should have been. If only it had been as good as the poster.

Navy Blues (1929)

Director: Clarence Brown
Stars: William Haines, Anita Page, Karl Dane and J C Nugent

For his first sound film, William Haines returned yet again to a military setting, which always felt strange to me, especially given the surreal ongoing saga that is 'don't ask, don't tell'. It isn't only that Haines was gay, it was that he was obviously gay. In real life he continually incensed studio executives by refusing to deny his homosexuality, going so far as to live openly in a committed gay relationship with his partner, Jimmie Shields, a fifty year relationship that lasted his lifetime and cost him his movie career. On screen he isn't stereotypical or flamboyant, but he exhibits so many quintessentially gay mannerisms that it never ceased to amaze me how often his studio put him into uniform. In 1926 it was Tell It to the Marines, in 1928 West Point, now in 1929 Navy Blues. He even ended his screen career on Poverty Row with another military role in 1934's The Marines are Coming. Of course, on screen he was officially a ladies' man, so realism be damned.

His previous picture was Speedway, released earlier in 1929, and it's fascinating to compare his last silent movie with the first he made with sound, not least because the three main actors in many ways reprise the same parts they played in that film. Haines is Jack Kelly, the practical joker of his particular battleship, yet another opportunity for him to chase the ladies, antagonise the men and run through the inevitable story arc once more in ways that would cause his arrest today. If a real sailor acted like this they would spend most of their time in the brig. To be fair, he's a lot more sympathetic here than he was in Speedway, his inevitable fall from grace is a lot less powerful or direct and his just as inevitable redemption is more believable and worthy, but that doesn't mean that Kelly ends up fundamentally different from any of the other characters Haines had played over the previous decade or so.

Most of his jokes are unsurprisingly perpetrated on his friend, Sven Swanson, yet another chance for Karl Dane to haul out the tough but dumb Swede persona that he had been wearing for even longer than Haines had been playing practical jokers. Dane gets more screen time here than he did in Speedway, especially early on, but that merely helps to highlight just how thick his Danish accent was, the primary reason for the collapse of his career. Many actors lost their careers with the advent of sound, because they didn't speak English, because they didn't sound as audiences expected or because they weren't intelligible to a wide audience. Dane fits in the latter category, an English speaking foreigner who couldn't have pulled off a major part without substantial voice training. However this film suggests that he could have stayed on screen as was, merely in much smaller roles, similar to this one where his 6' 3½" bulk is more important than his voice.

Dane's decline was so tragic that he became one of the most referenced examples in Hollywood history. He had found fame in The Big Parade in 1925 and major roles in La Bohème, The Scarlet Letter and Son of the Sheik brought him to a salary of $1,500 a week, but in less than a decade he would be penniless and dead by his own hand, unable to persuade MGM to give him even $5 a day as an extra or carpenter. His Danish accent may have been the catalyst for his decline, but the stories don't include the many other factors that contributed. He worked through a nervous breakdown and suffered from a bout of pneumonia, a relationship with a crazy Russian dancer and the loss of all his mining investments to fraud. A return to vaudeville failed and even menial jobs didn't work out, including the famous hot dog stand that wasn't really in front of the gates of MGM. When a pickpocket took his last $18, he locked his door and shot himself dead.

Perhaps the most tragic thing about Dane's story is that it doesn't seem unlikely for a character he might play. So often he was the big man that everyone else took advantage of, whether that be his gold rush partner in The Trail of '98 who manoeuvred him into doing both their jobs or his shipmate here fleecing him of his dance partner and his pay. Dane played big and dumb, Haines played small and bright, even though he was six feet tall, a sort of prototype for the fast talking con man that Lee Tracy would soon master in the precodes. Sure enough, it's Dane's character who's matched with Anita Page's at a Ladies Uplift Society dinner dance that the crew attend, but it's Haines who leaves with her in yet another astounding display of insolent insubordination. He manhandles her emotions unashamedly during his ship's leave. Caught up in a whirl, Allie Brown leaves her family for him, only for him to put her up in a hotel and go back on board ship.

Anita Page was so frequently a romantic interest for Haines that he proposed to her for real in 1932, during the shooting of Are You Listening? It wasn't serious, of course, but it demonstrates how close they were as friends that when Louis B Mayer piled on the pressure for him to enter into a lavender marriage, that he chose her to ask. I wonder if Mayer was a contributing factor to her declining his proposal, given that 1932 was also the year that her own MGM contract lapsed, apparently because she rejected Mayer's sexual advances. Like Haines and Dane, she's given a much more substantial part here than in Speedway, one that leads her round a rollercoaster of an ethical story arc, from a virtuous daughter to a taxi dancer, or paid dance partner, a common precode metaphor for prostitute, then finally back to reconciliation with her family in the finalé. While Haines's character finds redemption, for a change he shares it with his leading lady.

I'd call the plot a simple one, but compared to Speedway it's deep. However nobody watches a William Haines movie to be enlightened, they come to watch his schtick. Audiences must have liked what they saw because this slightly more sympathetic version of his usual routine sped him on the way to even greater success. A year later he was the biggest male box-office draw in all of Hollywood, something that must have stuck in Louis B Mayer's craw. He shares the film better than usual here too, giving Dane and especially Page opportunities to shine. Dane gets to fight on a few occasions, one brief scene in the lobby of the Garden Cabaret being a gem. He knocks out the doorman and pulls down a chandelier to use as a prop in knocking out plenty more. Page carries the dramatic side of the picture, though she's not as sympathetic as she should be. All in all, it's a great step back up after Speedway for all concerned, but still not enough.

Speedway (1929)

Director: Harry Beaumont
Stars: William Haines, Anita Page, Ernest Torrence and Karl Dane

Speedway is an unfortunate movie. As a piece of entertainment, it fails on every level except the acting, the cast members trotting out their standard routines yet again without anything new to keep it fresh. Only one plays against type, the rest so in character that we often feel like we're watching stock footage. Yet it maintains a great deal of historic value, both to race fans and film fans. Race fans will appreciate that it's set at the Indianapolis racetrack, with the cooperation of the Indianapolis Speedway Association and the participation of some of the racers. Much of the end of the film is comprised of footage from the Indy 500 in 1929. Film fans will see this not only as the last silent movie William Haines made, but as something of a who's who of silent stars, almost all of whom were closing in on the end of their careers, though for very different reasons. Only one of these silent legends became known as a sound era actor.

Haines was capable enough, as can plainly be seen in his first sound film, Navy Blues, released later the same year. The public certainly thought so too, as he was the top male box-office draw of 1930. His career ended simply because he refused to leave his lover, Jimmie Shields, when Louis B Mayer, the most important man in Hollywood and Haines's boss at MGM, ordered him to do so. Haines and Shields remained together for over fifty years, Joan Crawford calling them 'the happiest married couple in Hollywood', but his final film was The Marines are Coming in 1934. Blacklisted from the screen, he became instead the most notable interior decorator to the stars. More traditionally, the career of Karl Dane, his foil in so many movies and the butt of his pranks both here and in Navy Blues, ended because of his thick Danish accent. Rasmus Karl Therkelsen Gottlieb became Karl Dane in Hollywood just as I'd have become Charlie English.

It's these two we see first, Haines apparently driving through the streets in a racecar to wow the crowds but in reality being towed by Dane to the Indianapolis racetrack. Haines isn't even the driver, he's just the mechanic, but, 'according to Bill Whipple's impression of Bill Whipple,' the intertitle suggests, 'nobody had anything on Bill Whipple but Bill Whipple.' If I'd had no context at all, I'd still have known that Bill Whipple would be played by William Haines, that's how close it is to his formula of frivolous arrogance. Dane is Dugan, another employee of Jim MacDonald, played by Ernest Torrence. MacDonald is a sympathetic character, perhaps the only one in the film, both as a father figure to the orphaned Whipple and as the underdog of the picture, given that he's raced in every Indy 500 since it began but is zero for seventeen thus far. This is his last attempt to win it because his heart won't hold out too much longer.

Torrence is the one actor playing against type. A veteran silent actor, he was best known for villainous roles, not least opposite Richard Barthelmess in Tol'able David and as Captain Hook in the 1924 version of Peter Pan. His career ended in the most emphatic way possible in 1933 when he died after surgery to remove gallstones, otherwise he'd have done fine in the sound era. He played Moriarty to Clive Brook's Holmes in 1932 and his last role, a year later, was as Claudette Colbert's father in I Cover the Waterfront. Quality didn't necessarily mean a successful transition though, as leading lady Anita Page discovered. The year she made this film she was known as 'the girl with the most beautiful face in Hollywood' and she received 10,000 fan letters per week, numbers behind only Greta Garbo's. Yet, as she told it, this merely led to sexual advances from Louis B Mayer and his right hand man, Irving Thalberg, so her contract was cancelled in 1932.

Neither Torrence nor Page get much to do here, though both get more than Dane. All of them are only really in the picture as props for Haines, who runs roughshod over all of them, as he tended to do. It's hard to describe to modern audiences what Haines did. Simply suggesting he was one of the first wisecracking leads doesn't cover it because it was the sheer degree to which he went that characterised him most. Perhaps the best comparison today would be to one of Jim Carrey's caricatures, but he was more realistic, while being just as intensely annoying. His idea of a chat up line is, 'What a break for you! You met me!' His romantic style falls into the modern definition of 'stalker', both mentally and physically. He sticks to the woman he chooses like chewing gum on their boot and, if she frees herself of him briefly, he has no compunction in lying down in the road ahead of her car, pretending death, so he can reattach himself when she rescues him.

What kept these antics from being unbearable is that his story arc always involved him falling seriously from grace, then finding redemption at the end of the picture. Speedway provides him with a less emphatic redemption than normal, but the script is notably more slight than similar films he made around this time. The stunts he pulls provide mild repercussions early, like when he climbs into another woman's car to chat her up, only to leave when he discovers she's the daughter of a policeman, but those repercussions build until he's shamelessly manipulated by the villain into betraying those he cares about, only to be promptly thrust into the shame corner when his talents are no longer required. That leaves us with a sentimental and unbelievable Indy 500 to finish off the film, with an even more sentimental and unbelievable ending. Then again, we're only shown two teams so a suspenseful race was never on the cards.

MacDonald's competition on the track comes in the form of another great Hollywood villain, John Miljan, who is on very safe territory here as the villainous Lou Renny, so villainous that we want to hiss at him as we would at Dick Dastardly. Miljan was the only major cast member to survive more than a few years in the sound era and was coincidentally the most experienced with sound, having narrated the trailer to The Jazz Singer in 1927, thus predating Al Jolson's groundbreaking words in that film. He would still be in demand in the late fifties after over two hundred movies, his last role being the chief in The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold in 1958. With Haines utterly dominant, the script almost forgets Miljan, even though the young lady that Whipple sets his sights on, Pat Bonner, is supposedly Renny's fiancée. By the time he actually does anything, that plot strand has disappeared utterly, making us wonder if we heard right to begin with.

It's stunning to watch all these silent legends sidelined so ruthlessly. It isn't just Page, Torrence, Dane and Miljan, but others too. Eugenie Besserer is MacDonald's wife, surprisingly briefly given that her screen career stretched as far back as playing Auntie Em in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1910. Like her screen husband here, death soon ended her career. Polly Moran is almost as underused, though she had been one of Mack Sennett's most consistent comediennes for a decade and a half. She got a surprising lease of life in the early sound era, teaming up with Marie Dressler, but then lapsed out of fashion and into bit parts as the thirties ran on. All we get is Haines, as in your face as he ever was, but less funny and more annoying. Even when Pat gets him up in the air for some aerobatic retribution, she loses a wing and he ends up saving the day with the only parachute. Without believable redemption, Haines can be unbearable.

And with even Haines fans potentially giving up on this clunker, the only reason for them to stay with the film is the race footage. It is fascinating to watch professional motor racing this old, as it bears very little resemblance to anything seen today, not least because the cars are tall and thin with big wheels far out from the body. They look dangerous, even before we see the crashes, so it's not surprising to find that one driver, Bill Spence, died during the race and the winner, Ray Keech, died sixteen days later in a 200 mile race at Altoona. Through synchronised sound, we're treated to plenty of engine noise to accompany the race footage, but modern technology like on car cameras has spoiled us and so we're hardly immersed in the race. The camera does venture onto the track, capably but never consistently. Unfortunately, with the story so disappointing and most of the stars so underused, it's a shame that we have to wait so long for the race.

A Feather in Her Hat (1935)

Director: Alfred Santell
Stars: Pauline Lord, Basil Rathbone, Louis Hayward, Billie Burke and Wendy Barrie

One of those thirties movies so eager to advertise that it was sourced from literature that its title card is the book, A Feather in Her Hat ended up as little more than a curiosity and a filmography filler. The lead is Pauline Lord, a stage actress I'd never heard of who only appeared in two films: this and Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, released a year earlier, suggesting that while she may have picked her roles well on stage, she didn't manage it with film. I was more interested in the rest of the cast though, especially her immediate support. This is the only one of the seven movies Basil Rathbone made in 1935 that I haven't yet seen, a great year for him with a Garbo picture, two Dickens adaptations and a gloriously villainous turn in Captain Blood, among others. Louis Hayward, Billie Burke and Wendy Barrie round out the major names in major roles, and much further down the credits is a young David Niven, earning only his second credit in six films.

In Hyde Park, London, in 1925, a man complains to a crowd about how nobody has any money in the Depression. Capt Randolph Courtney is talked into addressing them too, but as well spoken as he is, he only gets through a few rambling insults before the drink in him knocks him out flat. He's Rathbone, of course, and he's a little fond of the bottle. He's rescued by Clarissa Phelps of Clarissa's Corner Shop, to which she takes him after the crowd disperses, mostly because of his speech about how any child can move up in the world just through the powers of dedication and education. Sure enough, after ten years of his help, her son Richard does just that. Unlike the 11 year old Richard, this version is well spoken and well dressed. He's even a playwright. And here, as he turns 21, he and we are both shocked by a number of surprises that come completely out of nowhere in a very capable way. The writing here is massively inconsistent, but often great.

Apparently his name is really Richard Orland, or something like that. She isn't his mother; that was an actress she won't name. She gives him a bank book with a thousand pounds of balance. And she asks him to leave. In fact he must leave, because she's done her part and that was the agreement. I really wasn't expecting this turn of events and neither was Capt Courtney. While Clarissa stays mum, the captain helps young Richard to track down his real family, discovering through her old correspondence that she used to work as a maid for an actress called Julia Trent, whose husband was an explorer who was lost in the Arctic. Now she's Julia Trent Anders and it's her house in which Richard rents a room and we meet the rest of the key members of the cast. Julia is as dizzy as you would expect for any character played by Billie Burke; and Pauline Anders, her stepdaughter, is a live wire, energetically portrayed by an excellent Wendy Barrie.

For his part, Louis Hayward exhibits plenty of sophistication, three years before he would play the Saint. It's a curiosity that two of the three well spoken Englishmen in this film were South African, both Rathbone and Hayward born in Johannesburg. Only David Niven was English. To extend that notion, none of these Englishwomen were English either, whether well spoken or not. Wendy Barrie was born in Hong Kong, though of English heritage. Burke was American, but belonged to a high enough circle to hide her accent. Pauline Lord was American too, as was the admirable Cockney slip of a girl who competes with Barrie for Richard's attentions. She's Nydia Westman, and with Lord she was my discovery here, though I have seen her before in Bulldog Drummond movies. Remarkably given this international array of talent, the English setting is thoroughly believable, as is the central conflict between landed and working classes.

I found the film to be very awkward as a whole, though I was fascinated throughout. Mostly I was enthralled by the excellent acting, not only by those I watched to see but those I hadn't heard of. Pauline Lord does excellent work as Clarissa Phelps, with a H in front of every word she can find, making me wonder what could have been if she'd have decided to stay on the screen. Originally the part was aimed at Ruth Chatterton, who would not have been as good. Wendy Barrie shines. Her costumes should have swamped her role entirely but they don't. Nydia Westman refuses to leave our attention, even though she's by definition a drab and inconsequential character when compared to the rest. Billie Burke sparkles and warbles, but not in any way we don't expect. On the male side of the cast, Hayward does a solid job as Richard, capably embracing the mystery at the centre of his existence, namely who he really is.

Unfortunately the writing is truly schizophrenic, perhaps highlighted best by the fact that the mystery we wonder most about is the background of Rathbone's character. He doesn't get the time to develop Capt Courtney fully, but we're fascinated nonetheless. He plays older than his 43 years, obviously of the upper classes and just as obviously fallen, but not so far that he isn't an admirable fish out of water. He walks with a cane and a stagger and he's rarely without a glass or a bottle in his hand, but he never appears as drunk as his first scene. Yet while we discover who Richard really is, we don't get the same revelation for the captain. Strangely, for a film that revolves around a character who writes for a living, it's full of promise that the writing can't quite keep a focus on. It keeps our interest and on occasion keeps us engrossed, but it's hard to grasp quite where it's going at any point.

There's the mystery of who Richard really is and who his mother really is. There are two vaguely romantic subplots: Clarissa and Capt Courtney, then Richard and either Pauline Anders or Emily Judson, two lovely girls from completely different classes. There are plot changes that come out of the blue, beyond the revelations of Richard's 21st birthday. At one point he's involved in a cab accident in the fog, prompting the clash of his two lives. Clarissa's health is an undercurrent throughout the film that we mostly ignore until it's too big to do so. There's also the return to the stage of Julia Trent, in a play that Richard writes for her. The film only runs 72 minutes but these myriad plots make us wonder which we should focus on. The script wonders too, as the finalé apparently aims to but forgetfully fails to tidy up all loose ends. Whether that's the fault of I A R Wylie's source novel or Lawrence Hazard's adaptation, it's still a serious but fascinating failure.

The Son-Daughter (1932)

Director: Clarence Brown
Stars: Helen Hayes and Ramon Novarro

A century or so ago a western fascination with the Orient arose, almost as if the creative minds at the time suddenly noticed that there was an entire other race of people mingling with them on a daily basis. So up sprang the yellow peril pulps, inscrutable detective tales and tragic Oriental dramas, which pretended at tolerance but often found themselves the most racist of all. Here's a great example: to explore a quintessentially Chinese quandary are a host of westerners whose names fail to inspire confidence. It was adapted by John Goodrich and Claudine West from a play by George M Scarborough and David Belasco, with dialogue by Leon Gordon. The cast similarly shuns able ethnic actors of the day, like Anna May Wong or Sessue Hayakawa, for westerners, whether used to yellowface, like Lewis Stone, Warner Oland and H B Warner, or not, such as Helen Hayes, First Lady of the American Theater, and Ramon Navarro, son of a Mexican dentist.

During a popular rebellion against the Manchu dynasty, we find ourselves among sympathisers in San Francisco 'while Imperial hatchet men, hirelings of the tyrant, watched and sprang from furtive corners.' One prominent sympathiser, Sin Kai, is tasked with bribing American sailors to smuggle weapons back to China. He's played by the ever respectable H B Warner, one of the few westerners who could almost get away with acting in yellowface, most famously in Lost Horizon. His nemesis is Fen Sha, the Sea Crab, who has become the richest gambler in Chinatown partly by selling out his countrymen to the Emperor's envoy. He's Warner Oland, who despite being Swedish had played eastern roles as far back as Mandarin's Gold in 1919 and he would continue to do so throughout his career. This stereotypical villain role came after three turns as a more surprisingly believable villain, Fu Manchu, and three of his sixteen outings as Charlie Chan.

I had some vague expectation that The Son-Daughter was a well regarded film of the time that had merely aged terribly. What I found with Oland's early scenes is that it's a pulp adventure in delusion about being a work of art. After watching the Sea Crab open fire on the plotters, then torture them with an inane grin on his face, I couldn't take it seriously, and that's before we get to the leads. Trust me, while I could never buy Oland as Oriental, he's leagues ahead of what we see in the early scenes with Helen Hayes, Lewis Stone and Ramon Navarro. Hayes is Lian Wha, known as Star Blossom, and she sounds about as Chinese as I do. Lewis Stone is her father, the unfortunately named Dr Dong Tong, and he is much like Lewis Stone usually is, whatever race he's playing. Ramon Novarro looks painfully like Peter Sellers as university student Tom Lee, especially as he's so adoring of Star Blossom from afar that he walks into lamp posts.

The courtship between these two is so giddy and overblown that it's acutely painful to see. Their first actual meeting, after many slipped notes, sets us in motion with neither Hayes nor Navarro able to shed their accents. Tom Lee is supposed to be native born Chinese, whose father sent him to college in the US to prepare for the new China, yet he sounds like the Mexican American that he was. Hayes does a far better job than Katharine Hepburn, Luise Rainer or Renée Adorée in yellowface, and she does improve as the film runs on, but to begin with she's embarrassing, as stereotypically fragile an Oriental flower as could be conjured up in nightmare. The best thing about their love is that it's doomed. Sin Kai comes to Dong Tong to ask for $25,000, a quarter of the $100,000 he needs to continue to bribe the smugglers. He doesn't have it, so he's asked to give his daughter up for betrothal to a rich merchant as any true patriot would.

And so to the conveniences, which riddle this script like holes in Swiss cheese. Dong Tong sells Lian Wha to the highest bidder, who is of course the dastardly Sea Crab. Useless Star Blossom magically transforms during the betrothal auction into a dangerous and courageous enemy to the Emperor. Sin Kai tells Dong Tong that the son of Prince Chun is in the city and of course that's Tom Lee. One more scene and his father is dead in a hail of Manchurian bullets. He must go home to take up his father's fight, but he doesn't. Sin Kai is captured by the bitter Fang Fou Hy, the Sea Crab's superior, the Emperor's envoy, and brings him to the Sea Crab's lair. Facing torture to give up Prince Chun he commits suicide with a poison Dong Tong has secreted under his fingernail. For some reason, H B Warner is replaced with a wax head just for a moment so Fang Fou Hy can throw tea in his face to prove his death.

And I'll give up here. I love pulp literature and I have a fondness for politically incorrect yellow peril stories, so I should be the target audience for something like this. Yet what in print can be an exotic tale of high adventure tends to become an offensive embarrassment on screen. Most of it is that that our imaginations can picture Fu Manchu however we like and we naturally go for authentic ethnicity. On film that's impossible, because Hollywood made insane casting decisions like rejecting the magnificently talented Chinese American actress Anna May Wong because she was too Chinese to play Chinese. So we get Helen Hayes and Ramon Navarro, H B Warner and Warner Oland, Lewis Stone and Ralph Morgan, even Louise Closser Hale as Toy Yah, confidante to Lian Wha and servant to Dr Dong Tong. Even imagining a better storyline with these actors becomes a painful concept, and the one we have is painful to begin with.

Not everything is bad here: the marriage procession is capable and the costumes are interesting. However this was an MGM film, the richest of the studios, and this is hardly the peak of their set design. Mostly it just goes horribly wrong. The music is as overblown as the story, which is worst of all. Writer George Scarborough filed a lawsuit against MGM over alterations to the play it was based on. It's not clear how that turned out, but the film's script doesn't fail at odd points, it fails consistently throughout. The casting is terrible, only Warner Oland winning out as the Sea Crab and then only through authenticity as a pulp villain not a Chinese gambler. The only fight scene is poorly handled. The romance is embarrassing. The tragedy is wasted. Even Clarence Brown's direction is uninspired though capable. I've found his films inconsistent: for every Flesh and the Devil or A Free Soul, there's an underwhelming star vehicle like Anna Christie or Chained.

The most interesting things I can relay about The Son-Daughter are things you wouldn't see if you watched the film. Apparently the crew used special lighting techniques to make Chinatown appear drab at night but gaudy by day, though I didn't notice this while watching. Instead it's a little exotic throughout with some elevation during the marriage procession. Just as with most Hollywood productions centered around Oriental themes, many genuine ethnic actors were cast as extras, probably with the aim of making the background look realistic even if the foreground didn't. There were many here and a full four hundred of them went on strike until they could be served the sort of food they expected. The lesson is that it's more interesting to read about The Son-Daughter than to watch it. You'd be honestly better off watching Warner Oland as Charlie Chan, Peter Lorre as Mr Moto or even Boris Karloff as Mr Wong.

Star Trek (2009)

Director: J J Abrams
Stars: John Cho, Ben Cross, Bruce Greenwood, Simon Pegg, Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Winona Ryder, Zoë Saldana, Karl Urban, Anton Yelchin, Eric Bana and Leonard Nimoy

The J J Abrams reboot of Star Trek is a bright and shiny affair from moment one. It isn't just the action and the explosions, it's the light and the colour of it all too. The spectacle sucks us in but a brief moment when a crew member explodes into space suggests quality because, admirably, the sound disappears when we're outside. It reminds us to search for substance in this summer blockbuster, which has also been called a great film. It's still in the IMDb Top 250 two years on, but then so is Avatar which, as far as sci-fi blockbusters go, had precisely nothing beyond the bright and shiny. We wonder for a while as substitute captain Kirk orders an evacuation of the USS Kelvin, only to remain to fight off Capt Nero and his Romulans single handed while his wife gives birth in a corridor. The key is that the Capt Kirk we know is the baby being born not the man at the helm. I'm amazed mom doesn't say, 'He's dead, Jim' when inevitability arrives.

Next are introductions. The young James Tiberius Kirk runs his guardian's vintage car off a cliff trying to outrun a robot cop on a hoverbike, while Spock declines acceptance into the Vulcan Academy of Science when they suggest that his human mother was a disadvantage. He goes to Starfleet Academy instead. Uhura is already there, as Kirk discovers when she walks into an Iowa bar and he hits on her. She's under Capt Pike, who dares young Jim to do better than his father, a man who was a starship captain for only twelve minutes but who still saved eight hundred lives, including Jim's and his mother's. These introductions bode well, given that they're required to both introduce new characters to a new audience and re-establish those that many of us already know from a generation or two of background, while still throwing in some cool geeky details for hardcore fans to notice. The inclusion of Pike as mentor was a neat touch.

Star Trek has been around for a long time and has become the bedrock of popular science fiction on the screen. To highlight that, I turned forty this year but I wasn't even born when the original series aired on NBC. I did grow up watching the show though, then the next show and the films and people like me are going to watch this one with the aim of finding out how the characters we already know are introduced to the next generation, pun not intended. Everyone except Nurse Chapel arrives eventually, as the script contorts itself every which way it can to ensure that they do. Somehow a serious attack on the Federation from the future encompasses only the original series characters plus a single new villain, Capt Nero. To hint that there are plot conveniences is the understatement of the year, but half the fun here is watching to see how they do it. It's like a magic trick. We know we're being fooled but we want to try to figure out how.

Bones shows up next, on the shuttle Jim takes after he decides to sign up for officer training. Karl Urban does the best job of connecting to the original character, believable as a young DeForest Kelley, but the rest didn't do too badly. Chris Pine naturally gets most opportunity, but while Kirk was always unconventional, Pine plays him a little more maverick than I expected. He's certainly the focal point. Zachary Quinto was the most disappointing for me as Spock, though I wonder if this was inevitable because of the way his character was written. His story arc here relates to a struggle to determine whether he wants his human side or his Vulcan side to dominate. He goes for the Vulcan but he's obviously too human for it to work. There's potential for him to be great in the inevitable second film but he wasn't here. In fact when Leonard Nimoy turns up at a rather surprising moment, it only serves to underline Quinto's inadequacies.

Eventually there's the new bright and shiny flagship USS Enterprise, ever a character of its own. Pike is in charge, with Spock as his first officer. It's there we meet Sulu and seventeen year old Chekov, both already at their customary posts but very green. John Cho and Anton Yelchin have fun with their roles and make themselves noticed, growing as characters as the story runs on. Uhura and Bones are there too, quickly promoted as superiors die or their particular skills are needed. All fit what we might visualise as embryonic versions of the characters we know, but Zoë Saldana plays Uhura a little differently. She's a strong woman and a sex symbol, neither of which are surprising, but she doesn't seem remotely like a young Nichelle Nichols. Scotty is the last to arrive, halfway through the film after it jumps the shark. Simon Pegg gets least to do, as a deus ex machina to get Jim back onto the Enterprise, but he impresses from moment one.

I wasn't kidding about the film jumping the shark but it seems to revel in it, perhaps because of what it's trying to do. There's an important thing to know here, one that I wasn't aware of before watching. This is a reboot to an established franchise, like so many other films nowadays, but it isn't the usual safe and pointless remake. It boldly goes where nobody quite expected it to go, unafraid to change fundamentals, and had I been more of a fan than I am I'd have noticed that from the opening scene. For half the film, I didn't buy into the suspense, because this is the past and I knew which characters would be alive in the future. Yet when Capt Nero destroys the entire planet of Vulcan, I was shocked into realising that this is not the Star Trek we know. This is an alternate universe Star Trek, one in which sacred cows are slain and we can't be sure of what might happen next. The suspense returns because the future is suddenly open.

There's an underlying theme of cheating in the story, beginning with the famous Kobayashi Maru test which Kirk passes by reprogramming the simulation in his version of the Gordian knot. Here, Spock is the original programmer and they meet for the first time in front of Starfleet Academy to argue about the ethics of what was done. It's all about cheating and that theme returns over and over again. I can't help but see the entire film as a cheat, a deliberate one from scriptwriters who were firmly on Kirk's side of that argument. They know where they want their story to end up and they are utterly willing to cheat in every way possible to ensure that it gets there. I don't necessarily like everything they did but I can't help but admire how bold Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman were to attempt this. Given what director J J Abrams has been doing with Fringe over the last season, also with Nimoy, I can't help but see comparisons.

I don't buy into this version of Star Trek being a great film. It's certainly leagues ahead of Avatar but it has obvious flaws beyond any geek discussion about how beloved characters were treated. The overblown choral music and some floating platform set design are clichés. The stunts are over the top. Plot conveniences are omnipresent and at some points blatant. The central plot is inevitably underdeveloped with a new franchise in mind and so many characters to re-introduce. Yet I think it succeeds for the most part. It's thoughtful as well as dynamic, as any Star Trek story should be. Its two hours whiz by in a flash, with plenty of action. There are fun new gadgets like retractable parachutes, most of the expected catchphrases and some fun references: we watch Jim in bed with a girl with green skin, there's a running joke about Uhura's first name and the red shirt arrives exactly when we expect him. It definitely bodes well for the 2012 sequel.

The Cyclops (1957)

Director: Bert I Gordon
Stars: James Craig, Gloria Talbott, Lon Chaney and Tom Drake

Back in the fifties, if you wanted giants you watched movies by Bert I Gordon, whose initials were tellingly BIG. He started off big with prehistoric monsters in 1955's King Dinosaur, then followed up with giant grasshoppers in Beginning of the End in 1957. The Cyclops was when he first used a giant human being, the title character who is 25 feet tall, but it really underlined his career, as his second of six films in two years, which also included The Amazing Colossal Man and War of the Colossal Beast. He'd return to giants often in his films, whether human or not, with pictures like Earth vs The Spider, Village of the Giants and The Food of the Gods. Only occasionally would he go the other way, shrinking characters in Attack of the Puppet People, but rarest of all were attempts to leave everybody the size they should be. It's almost like Mr BIG, as Forrest Ackerman called him, just didn't want to see anyone normal sized.

The Cyclops is fun even during the opening credits, as each page is hammered onto the screen with its own crescendo. When the music dies down, we find ourselves in the Mexican town of Guayjorm, where an American lady, Susan Winter, is still looking for her fiancé, Bruce Barton, after his plane crashed three years earlier. She's played by Gloria Talbott, who initially looks a little unfortunately like Roddy McDowall playing a nun. Later she's more reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn, which is never a bad comparison to make for an actress. Her trip is hindered by the governor, who doesn't want adventurers exploring the local mountains, and that's who he sees in her party of four. None of the rest believe that Barton could still be alive, even his friend Russ Bradford, a toxicologist played by James Craig. He got top billing, though he's trying a little too hard to be a cheap Clark Gable in Clark Kent glasses. He likes Susan too, big time.

The others in the party are Lee Brand, the pilot, and Marty Melville, who's exploring for uranium deposits. Tom Drake is solid as Brand, who seems good at his job, though he's a little fond of the bottle and he apparently can't get a job anywhere else, having already failed in the oil business in Texas. After all this was 1957: four decades or so later and he could have become president. Melville's the real live wire, in the form of Lon Chaney Jr, appearing again without the Jr. He's a selfish and arrogant man, quick with his fists but a coward at heart. He's dumb enough to knock the pilot out during their flight, so down they go, conveniently in a location where Melville finds his uranium, but unfortunately in an area populated by giant creatures whose cells divide every 22 seconds thus stimulating constant growth. You won't be surprised to find that, having been stuck here for three years, Bruce Barton has become the 25 foot tall cyclops.

At least the first monsters we see are composited well, a giant lizard crawling behind a rock and a giant hawk catching a giant rat. That won't last. When our newcomers discover the inevitable monster battle, the combatants, a giant iguana and a giant gila monster, are half transparent, utterly ridiculous. While the cyclops may look a little ridiculous, not a real cyclops but a giant with a deformed face that has left only one eye visible, he's added into the frame well. However by this point we're at the caves in Bronson Canyon, a popular spot to shoot Hollywood films since the silent days, but one that bad movie fans can't help but recognise as Ro-Man's HQ in Robot Monster. However many movies use that very same cave entrance, which in 1957 alone also included Attack of the Crab Monsters and The Brain from Planet Arous, I never fail to see Ro-Man's bubble machine and that doesn't help the credibility of the picture I'm watching.

Duncan Parkin gets a thankless job as Barton, the Cyclops of the title. It's not the mask he has to wear, as cheap as it is, because it's actually quite memorable. It's the fact that he's stuck playing the character like a retarded kid without the power of speech, mumbling unintelligibly, no better than Tor Johnson in The Beast of Yucca Flats. He's a walking, talking monster, except the walking and talking are problematic. He does get to wrestle a giant snake at one point, but as we can see the tape wrapped round its mouth to make it less dangerous, the suspense is utterly lost. Parkin only ever worked for Gordon, starting out as a stagehand in Beginning of the End, progressing to the monster role in both The Cyclops and War of the Colossal Beast, the latter under the name Dean Parkin. I wonder if he ever wanted a part where he could talk and actually interact with the characters outside of the magic of special effects. We may never know.

Fortunately his fiancée from his normal sized life, Susan Winter, is a sassy lead, one who mounts this expedition to find him and runs it capably. Sure, she gets a few scream scenes but she's far from the usual born victim that women tended to be in films like this. Gloria Talbott wasn't used to horror and science fiction, but she proved willing and able to return to them, first for Daughter of Dr Jekyll, which ran with The Cyclops as a double bill, and then for I Married a Monster from Outer Space a year later. While James Craig gets the manly lead role and the top credit, he isn't really in charge at any point. He always defers to the lady, which is somewhat refreshing to see in what was often a sexist genre, even back in the fifties, where women showed up only to be either victims, eye candy or both. Seeing this soon after The Black Scorpion assured me that it wasn't always the case. Sometime women could be strong and capable, but still scream.