At Miss Briarcroft's School for Girls, French teacher Miss Sylvia Bruce is more than a little out of place. Everyone else is old and staid but she's a recent student there, still bubbly and full of life. She wants a way out and she finds it when she hears Bing Crosby on the radio, because of course this is 1933 and so Der Bingle is young and rather adorable to French teachers who aren't much older than their students. Next thing we know she's out the door and leaving almost everything behind, including the radio, in quest of that voice who she then stalks with a passion.
Every Marion Davies comedy I see reinforces just how great a comedienne she was, but every Marion Davies drama I see reinforces how much William Randolph Hearst was something of an optimist and as a serious actress she's little more than a cheap version of Myrna Loy. Don't get me wrong, she's far better than the material, but even with good lines she doesn't come to life unless there's comedy in them. The only decent scenes she gets here are when she gets to pretend to be someone else: a black mammy to get close to Bing or the temperamental French star to liven up supper.
Here I noticed Bing Crosby more than I noticed Marion Davies and that's a scary thought. She manages to put herself into some completely unbelievable situations and speak completely unbelievable dialogue with a completely unbelievably straight face. I got the impression she was as bored with the role as I was. The only thing she has going for her is that she's fluent in French, being a French teacher and all, and Bing needs to learn French to talk with Lily, his French girlfriend.
The songs are almost bad as the character of Miss Sylvia Bruce, who is supposed to be the heroine but is really nothing more than a scary stalker. Even the title song didn't do much to stop me falling asleep and that's probably the best of the bunch. Maybe I'm getting spoiled lately with all these Busby Berkeley production number musicals: they may still be full of thirties singing and dancing but they have the huge benefit of being completely insane. And talking of Busby Berkeley musicals, grouchy old Ned Sparks is here from Gold Diggers of 1933 as a director and he's the best thing about the film. That's great for him, but it doesn't say much for the picture.
Tuesday, 9 January 2007
The Champion (1915)
While this short seemed rather unfocused without much consistency in its plot, the version I saw may well have been missing quite a few minutes so it's very unlikely to be the fault of writer/director/star Charlie Chaplin. Such are the problems with cheap DVDs of public domain silent movies, the ones with canned ragtime music that has nothing to do with the story. At least this one doesn't have the same piece on repeat play! However even in what is presumably a massacred version The Champion has plenty going for it.
This time round Chaplin finds a horseshoe outside a boxing gym advertising for sparring partners. Needless to say it doesn't take him long to floor the big guy with all the immaculate timing you'd expect from the Little Tramp. In about five minutes he's fighting for the championship which takes up half the film, and is far more of a wrestling match than a boxing match. It really plays out like a WWE match, the only difference being that Hulk Hogan didn't win. The referee gets knocked out a few times, and there's plenty of rope work, illegal foreign objects and what looked to me like attempts at a pinfall.
He also gets to romance Edna Purviance for a few blinks of an eye and hiding in the background are Chaplin regulars Ben Turpin and Lloyd Bacon, who wouldn't even become a director for another seven years. Here he's just a sparring partner to get knocked out but many more small parts in Chaplin shorts and Broncho Billy movies later he'd become one of the major names at Warner Brothers with films like 42nd Street and Footlight Parade as directorial credits, along with no end of Cagney, Robinson and Bogart movies.
This time round Chaplin finds a horseshoe outside a boxing gym advertising for sparring partners. Needless to say it doesn't take him long to floor the big guy with all the immaculate timing you'd expect from the Little Tramp. In about five minutes he's fighting for the championship which takes up half the film, and is far more of a wrestling match than a boxing match. It really plays out like a WWE match, the only difference being that Hulk Hogan didn't win. The referee gets knocked out a few times, and there's plenty of rope work, illegal foreign objects and what looked to me like attempts at a pinfall.
He also gets to romance Edna Purviance for a few blinks of an eye and hiding in the background are Chaplin regulars Ben Turpin and Lloyd Bacon, who wouldn't even become a director for another seven years. Here he's just a sparring partner to get knocked out but many more small parts in Chaplin shorts and Broncho Billy movies later he'd become one of the major names at Warner Brothers with films like 42nd Street and Footlight Parade as directorial credits, along with no end of Cagney, Robinson and Bogart movies.
Monday, 8 January 2007
They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969)
Of all the things that don't seem like logical subjects for tense cinema, a two month long marathon dance competition seems high up the list, especially with today's ADHD attention spans. It's hard enough for Americans to understand the concept of five day test cricket matches but they're almost fleeting things compared to this. Fashions could come and go by the time the thing is over. It's an endurance test, pure and simple, or maybe torture along the lines of Japanese game shows. Along with the dancers, there are nurses and a house physician. The show couldn't keep running without them.
We're at the the World's Greatest Dance Marathon at the Pacific Ballroom, somewhere in California in 1932. A host of hopefuls, as well off as you'd expect people to be in the depression, take part for the free food and the chance at $1,500 which is unreal money, or even the remote possibility for a job. The rules are simple: don't stop dancing, which may make sense for a while but ten minute breaks don't add up to much when you're on the 25th day and the organisers decide to eliminate another three couples by staging a ten minute derby.
The couples include such names as Jane Fonda (who was Oscar nominated), Bruce Dern, Red Buttons and Susannah York. Their partners may not be as famous as they are but they have other reasons to be notable beyond the small town sponsorships they pick up during the competition. Fonda is a real knowing bitch but her partner is barred from entry for health reasons so she acquires a new one who wasn't even there for the competition. He's Michael Sarrazin, who I don't know at all but who looks more like a Fonda than Jane does. Susannah York is some sort of aspiring actress. Buttons is a sailor who's obviously older than everyone else but who seems livelier than most of them. Most notably Bruce Dern's partner is obviously pregnant.
I know the officials from television, like Michael Conrad, the first Sergeant on Hill Street Blues, and Al Lewis much better known as Grandpa Munster, who hardly speaks a word during the entire movie. Running the show though is Gig Young as Rocky the MC, lying through his teeth half the time, and he's the one who picked up the Oscar for Best Supporting Oscar. For my part it's Susannah York who steals the show, running the whole gamut from an almost Marilyn-esque aspiring actress to half blue crazy woman taking a shower in her clothes. She really makes us believe that she's been through the whole show, all one thousand and some hours of it.
Because it isn't the show that matters, or the gimmicks the organisers come up with to keep the crowds packing in, it's what the show does to the people taking part. After all, the show is life and it doesn't matter that we're alive, it's what we do with it. Competitors change partners because of what they've got up to during the breaks, wake up screaming because they're hallucinating or don't wake up at all without the help of ammonia or baths of ice water. And they change their attitudes to one another too: relationships build and collapse during the event. That's what keeps us watching this trainwreck, because it sure as hell ain't the sport of it. And that achievement, the fact that we do keep watching, means that Sydney Pollack did something very right indeed.
Incidentally I can't seem to keep away from Mervyn LeRoy. He didn't direct this one, because it's 1969 and thus four years after his last credited directorial job. He's here as a real person though, as played by some uncredited actor, because the film is set in 1932.
We're at the the World's Greatest Dance Marathon at the Pacific Ballroom, somewhere in California in 1932. A host of hopefuls, as well off as you'd expect people to be in the depression, take part for the free food and the chance at $1,500 which is unreal money, or even the remote possibility for a job. The rules are simple: don't stop dancing, which may make sense for a while but ten minute breaks don't add up to much when you're on the 25th day and the organisers decide to eliminate another three couples by staging a ten minute derby.
The couples include such names as Jane Fonda (who was Oscar nominated), Bruce Dern, Red Buttons and Susannah York. Their partners may not be as famous as they are but they have other reasons to be notable beyond the small town sponsorships they pick up during the competition. Fonda is a real knowing bitch but her partner is barred from entry for health reasons so she acquires a new one who wasn't even there for the competition. He's Michael Sarrazin, who I don't know at all but who looks more like a Fonda than Jane does. Susannah York is some sort of aspiring actress. Buttons is a sailor who's obviously older than everyone else but who seems livelier than most of them. Most notably Bruce Dern's partner is obviously pregnant.
I know the officials from television, like Michael Conrad, the first Sergeant on Hill Street Blues, and Al Lewis much better known as Grandpa Munster, who hardly speaks a word during the entire movie. Running the show though is Gig Young as Rocky the MC, lying through his teeth half the time, and he's the one who picked up the Oscar for Best Supporting Oscar. For my part it's Susannah York who steals the show, running the whole gamut from an almost Marilyn-esque aspiring actress to half blue crazy woman taking a shower in her clothes. She really makes us believe that she's been through the whole show, all one thousand and some hours of it.
Because it isn't the show that matters, or the gimmicks the organisers come up with to keep the crowds packing in, it's what the show does to the people taking part. After all, the show is life and it doesn't matter that we're alive, it's what we do with it. Competitors change partners because of what they've got up to during the breaks, wake up screaming because they're hallucinating or don't wake up at all without the help of ammonia or baths of ice water. And they change their attitudes to one another too: relationships build and collapse during the event. That's what keeps us watching this trainwreck, because it sure as hell ain't the sport of it. And that achievement, the fact that we do keep watching, means that Sydney Pollack did something very right indeed.
Incidentally I can't seem to keep away from Mervyn LeRoy. He didn't direct this one, because it's 1969 and thus four years after his last credited directorial job. He's here as a real person though, as played by some uncredited actor, because the film is set in 1932.
A Night Out (1915)
Last year I worked through a huge amount of early shorts from Charlie Chaplin, along with some of his later much renowned feature length movies. I found that just as later films like The Circus, City Lights and The Great Dictator were real classics, early films like half the 35 short films he made in 1914 were truly awful. To be fair they turned comedy on its head and set the stage for what it would become in the next few decades at the very least. One of Chaplin's last 1914 movies was Tillie's Punctured Romance, the first feature length comedy film ever made.
Those early films were for Mack Sennett's Keystone company, home of the Keystone Kops and by the last of them he was directing them himself. A year later he had moved to Essanay (from S&A for Spoor and Anderson, the founders of the studio). The budgets were bigger, the comedy had progressed and the films were notably better. This is an Essanay film and it's a pretty good one, certainly a lot better than those early shorts. It's also notable for being the first of Chaplin's films to feature Edna Purviance, who would become a regular in his movies, even starring in the feature film A Woman in Paris which he designed to be her route to stardom.
Chaplin is playing his character of the Little Tramp, as usual, and this time around he's also drunk, along with co-star and co-drunk Ben Turpin. They get into trouble with a far more classy gentleman, which we know because he has outrageous fake facial hair. They knock his hat off by accident and belt him in the face to knock him down, that sort of thing, but done with a sense of timing that seems almost unreal in the modern day. Watching Chaplin and Keaton in their prime is like watching a great ballet dancer: it really is poetry in motion. They mix it up with the dandy, the rotund head waiter at a posh restaurant and later even the waiter's wife, and I actually laughed along with it, precisely as I didn't to most of those Keystone films.
Those early films were for Mack Sennett's Keystone company, home of the Keystone Kops and by the last of them he was directing them himself. A year later he had moved to Essanay (from S&A for Spoor and Anderson, the founders of the studio). The budgets were bigger, the comedy had progressed and the films were notably better. This is an Essanay film and it's a pretty good one, certainly a lot better than those early shorts. It's also notable for being the first of Chaplin's films to feature Edna Purviance, who would become a regular in his movies, even starring in the feature film A Woman in Paris which he designed to be her route to stardom.
Chaplin is playing his character of the Little Tramp, as usual, and this time around he's also drunk, along with co-star and co-drunk Ben Turpin. They get into trouble with a far more classy gentleman, which we know because he has outrageous fake facial hair. They knock his hat off by accident and belt him in the face to knock him down, that sort of thing, but done with a sense of timing that seems almost unreal in the modern day. Watching Chaplin and Keaton in their prime is like watching a great ballet dancer: it really is poetry in motion. They mix it up with the dandy, the rotund head waiter at a posh restaurant and later even the waiter's wife, and I actually laughed along with it, precisely as I didn't to most of those Keystone films.
Sunday, 7 January 2007
Pépé le Moko (1937)
The colonial French police have a tough job on their hands: to apprehend the notorious criminal Pépé le Moko, who is hiding somewhere in the notorious Casbah in Algiers, a winding maze of chaos where 40,000 people live in an area intended for 10,000. It could even be the perfect example of the famous description Obi Wan Kenobi gave to Mos Eisley Spaceport: 'a wretched hive of scum and villainy'. Pépé is wanted for many things and has been on the run for two years. The police know where he is and even see him on a daily basis but are completely unable to arrest him in such a location. Inspector Slimane must concoct a plan and be particularly cunning about it.
Pépé and Slimane appear to be symbiotic: each would be lesser for the absence of the other. There's a scene of genius early on when the police, at the instigation of Paris, raid the Casbah and don't come near picking him up. However Slimane knows exactly where he'll find him and is already there waiting at the house of Inez the gypsy when Pépé walks down the stairs from the roof with a bullet wound in his arm for her to dress. The two of them chat together and taunt each other with the utmost civility, while showing off in front of the lady who has found refuge there. This is cinematic magic, pure and simple.
The star of this film, Jean Gabin, is often referred to as the French Bogart, but when this film was inevitably remade by Hollywood, as Algiers only a year later, it was Charles Boyer who took the role and it's his accent that led to the creation of the cartoon character Pepe le Pew. Perhaps it's merely the timing: Bogart had been around for a while by then but was still trying to find his way out of playing second fiddle all the time to the real Hollywood gangsters, Cagney, Robinson and even George Raft.
Pépé's counterpart on the side of authority, Inspector Slimane, is just as fascinating to watch. He's played by an actor called Lucas Gridoux, who was apparently born Romanian, and who comes very close to stealing the show here, always calculating and recalculating so that we see only what he wants us to see. However beyond Gabin, who can dominate the screen merely by sitting in it looking at someone, everyone here seems to be a character actor. There are whole scenes full of things happening in the background because everyone else on the screen is staying so well in character. The cast fit the location so well it's almost unbelievable that they haven't lived in the Casbah all their lives.
The Casbah, of course, is not just an area of a city but a a lead actor all of its own, and I'm amazed at how well the filmmakers manage to show us not just its three dimensional complexity but also how the inhabitants are moving components of it. The cinematographer, the musical director and the lighting crew all deserve to be recognised for their work here, whoever they are, along with director Julien Duvivier, to make the city a living entity. I've seen it before, well depicted too, in The Battle of Algiers, but even that masterpiece didn't manage to approach what it becomes here. It's a magical amorphous beast.
Henri La Barthe, the writer of both the screenplay and the source novel, deserves a huge amount of credit himself, for everything this film is but not least because of the way he treates the women. They may not be the lead characters by any means but they're strong and powerful and they do exactly what they want.
I'm sure Criterion must have a version of this available in a great DVD edition and I'll be buying it for sure. This is awesome and it may well become one of my favourite movies. It's horrible to even think about it but when Hollywood remade this film, producer Walter Wanger tried to have all prints of the original destroyed, just as a few years later they would try the same with the original English version of Gaslight. In both instances, they thankfully failed in their task, and indeed it's Algiers that ironically is now available in dollar stores everywhere because it's lapsed into the public domain. I prefer Gaslight in the English original but the world would be a lesser place without Pépé le Moko.
Pépé and Slimane appear to be symbiotic: each would be lesser for the absence of the other. There's a scene of genius early on when the police, at the instigation of Paris, raid the Casbah and don't come near picking him up. However Slimane knows exactly where he'll find him and is already there waiting at the house of Inez the gypsy when Pépé walks down the stairs from the roof with a bullet wound in his arm for her to dress. The two of them chat together and taunt each other with the utmost civility, while showing off in front of the lady who has found refuge there. This is cinematic magic, pure and simple.
The star of this film, Jean Gabin, is often referred to as the French Bogart, but when this film was inevitably remade by Hollywood, as Algiers only a year later, it was Charles Boyer who took the role and it's his accent that led to the creation of the cartoon character Pepe le Pew. Perhaps it's merely the timing: Bogart had been around for a while by then but was still trying to find his way out of playing second fiddle all the time to the real Hollywood gangsters, Cagney, Robinson and even George Raft.
Pépé's counterpart on the side of authority, Inspector Slimane, is just as fascinating to watch. He's played by an actor called Lucas Gridoux, who was apparently born Romanian, and who comes very close to stealing the show here, always calculating and recalculating so that we see only what he wants us to see. However beyond Gabin, who can dominate the screen merely by sitting in it looking at someone, everyone here seems to be a character actor. There are whole scenes full of things happening in the background because everyone else on the screen is staying so well in character. The cast fit the location so well it's almost unbelievable that they haven't lived in the Casbah all their lives.
The Casbah, of course, is not just an area of a city but a a lead actor all of its own, and I'm amazed at how well the filmmakers manage to show us not just its three dimensional complexity but also how the inhabitants are moving components of it. The cinematographer, the musical director and the lighting crew all deserve to be recognised for their work here, whoever they are, along with director Julien Duvivier, to make the city a living entity. I've seen it before, well depicted too, in The Battle of Algiers, but even that masterpiece didn't manage to approach what it becomes here. It's a magical amorphous beast.
Henri La Barthe, the writer of both the screenplay and the source novel, deserves a huge amount of credit himself, for everything this film is but not least because of the way he treates the women. They may not be the lead characters by any means but they're strong and powerful and they do exactly what they want.
I'm sure Criterion must have a version of this available in a great DVD edition and I'll be buying it for sure. This is awesome and it may well become one of my favourite movies. It's horrible to even think about it but when Hollywood remade this film, producer Walter Wanger tried to have all prints of the original destroyed, just as a few years later they would try the same with the original English version of Gaslight. In both instances, they thankfully failed in their task, and indeed it's Algiers that ironically is now available in dollar stores everywhere because it's lapsed into the public domain. I prefer Gaslight in the English original but the world would be a lesser place without Pépé le Moko.
Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)
I seem to be seeing a lot of Mervyn LeRoy movies lately. It became obvious early on in my cinematic explorations that Warner Brothers released a lot of movies in the thirties but didn't have too many directors to make them. The same names kept cropping up again and again: Roy Del Ruth, Archie Mayo, Lloyd Bacon and Mervyn LeRoy. LeRoy had been their boy wonder as far back as the late twenties, making cheap yet profitable pictures and he made a lot of of big hits from the thirties. All I know is that those I've seen from this decade are of a much higher quality, as a general rule, than those of, say Lloyd Bacon who made quite a few duds.
This is a musical, completely unrelated to the biggest Warner Brothers hit of this era, 1929's Gold Diggers of Broadway, which must be one of the most important lost films of them all. It's the second talkie to be made in Technicolor and the highest grossing film until Gone with the Wind took that title a decade later in 1939. As the follow up to the successful 42nd Street, it's also a musical full of Harry Warren and Al Dubin songs, including We're in the Money, which opens the film sung in the unorthodox voice of Ginger Rogers and accompanied by some seriously outre costumes. They're seemingly constructed out of fake coinage, draped around scantily clad chorus girls with large coins hanging over private parts that don't seem to be covered by anything else.
This production gets closed down before it opens, because producer Barney Hopkins runs out of money, but when the next one gets financed and we see a full production number, it's completely obvious that it's Busby Berkeley running the choreography. We see girls, scantily clad to start with, getting soaked and then stripping naked in silhouette behind screens; mischievous roller skating baby Billy Barty, a girl in a tin costume falling prey to a can opener, you name it. We certainly don't get any good idea of how big the set actually is because the camera moves all over the place and never seems to run out of room.
There are major early Warner Brothers names here too, though only one is duplicated from Page Miss Glory: Dick Powell, who is very different here from the daffy pilot in that film as Robert Treat Bradford, a rich Boston blue blood slumming it by writing music and financing and appearing in a musical. Most of the rest are women: Ginger Rogers, Joan Blondell, Aline MacMahon and Powell's frequent musical partner, Ruby Keeler. The lead is nominally Warren William but he doesn't even appear until halfway through the film. He's Powell's elder brother and trustee to his estate, a little less precode than usual, who gets rather upset at the thought of a Bradford being associated with a showgirl. He turns up to attempt to stop it all with a more distinguished Guy Kibbee than usual in tow.
I've never been a big fan of either Dick Powell and especially Ruby Keeler, though they were both hugely talented and they do exactly what is required here. I'm much more a fan of Ginger Rogers, who, as she famously said, did everything Fred Astaire did, backwards and in high heels. She doesn't have a huge part here but she's as great as I'm discovering she always is, even when she isn't singing in pig Latin. She plays very well off Aline MacMahon, who is a peach of a gold digger here. Joan Blondell has become my image of the gangster's moll, from all those Warner Brothers gangster movies with Cagney and Robinson. And for all my lack of appreciation for musicals in general, I'm finding that Busby Berkeley's production numbers, with all their completely insane logic, are exactly the sort of production numbers I enjoy. I wonder if he influenced Dr Seuss, or was it the other way around? This one's better than 42nd Street, for sure, though that was a great film in itself, and it may even approach the heights of Footlight Parade.
This is a musical, completely unrelated to the biggest Warner Brothers hit of this era, 1929's Gold Diggers of Broadway, which must be one of the most important lost films of them all. It's the second talkie to be made in Technicolor and the highest grossing film until Gone with the Wind took that title a decade later in 1939. As the follow up to the successful 42nd Street, it's also a musical full of Harry Warren and Al Dubin songs, including We're in the Money, which opens the film sung in the unorthodox voice of Ginger Rogers and accompanied by some seriously outre costumes. They're seemingly constructed out of fake coinage, draped around scantily clad chorus girls with large coins hanging over private parts that don't seem to be covered by anything else.
This production gets closed down before it opens, because producer Barney Hopkins runs out of money, but when the next one gets financed and we see a full production number, it's completely obvious that it's Busby Berkeley running the choreography. We see girls, scantily clad to start with, getting soaked and then stripping naked in silhouette behind screens; mischievous roller skating baby Billy Barty, a girl in a tin costume falling prey to a can opener, you name it. We certainly don't get any good idea of how big the set actually is because the camera moves all over the place and never seems to run out of room.
There are major early Warner Brothers names here too, though only one is duplicated from Page Miss Glory: Dick Powell, who is very different here from the daffy pilot in that film as Robert Treat Bradford, a rich Boston blue blood slumming it by writing music and financing and appearing in a musical. Most of the rest are women: Ginger Rogers, Joan Blondell, Aline MacMahon and Powell's frequent musical partner, Ruby Keeler. The lead is nominally Warren William but he doesn't even appear until halfway through the film. He's Powell's elder brother and trustee to his estate, a little less precode than usual, who gets rather upset at the thought of a Bradford being associated with a showgirl. He turns up to attempt to stop it all with a more distinguished Guy Kibbee than usual in tow.
I've never been a big fan of either Dick Powell and especially Ruby Keeler, though they were both hugely talented and they do exactly what is required here. I'm much more a fan of Ginger Rogers, who, as she famously said, did everything Fred Astaire did, backwards and in high heels. She doesn't have a huge part here but she's as great as I'm discovering she always is, even when she isn't singing in pig Latin. She plays very well off Aline MacMahon, who is a peach of a gold digger here. Joan Blondell has become my image of the gangster's moll, from all those Warner Brothers gangster movies with Cagney and Robinson. And for all my lack of appreciation for musicals in general, I'm finding that Busby Berkeley's production numbers, with all their completely insane logic, are exactly the sort of production numbers I enjoy. I wonder if he influenced Dr Seuss, or was it the other way around? This one's better than 42nd Street, for sure, though that was a great film in itself, and it may even approach the heights of Footlight Parade.
Saturday, 6 January 2007
Page Miss Glory (1935)
We're in Grand Central Station and the wide eyed and stunningly naive Loretta Dalrymple has just arrived in New York. She's from the country, obviously way out there in the country, and doesn't seem to have much clue about anything, but she lands a job as a chambermaid at the Park Regis and she has a good heart. That's where she meets Pat O'Brien and Frank McHugh, playing a couple of quick talking, quick thinking young men who know full well that people can become millionaires in three days in this town.
Their new big idea is to conjure up a composite picture of all the best parts of the best beauties they can find in the magazines to enter in a radio competition to find the most beautiful girl in the country for a modelling campaign. Unfortunately they soon find that they need to produce Dawn Glory herself. Companies are falling over themselves to hire her and hotshot publicist pilot Bingo Nelson, who's as daffy as she is, proposes to her on the air. Of course she doesn't exist, so they settle on turning their friendly chambermaid Loretta Dalrymple into Dawn Glory.
This is a great example of just how throwing money at something can create, if not the greatest film in the world, at least something fascinating to watch. It's a Cosmopolitan Picture, the company founded by William Randolph Hearst to create vehicles for his mistress Marion Davies and by this time he'd thankfully come to grips with the fact that while she wasn't a great actress she was a damn fine comedienne. She also somehow didn't have the egotism that she really ought to have had, and was quite happy to spend most of a film like this looking far less than her best, to the benefit of the picture.
Because Cosmopolitan Pictures had just moved across to the Warner Brothers lot, this movie is jam packed full with most of the Warners talent of the era. Beyond Pat O'Brien and Frank McHugh, there's Dick Powell as Bingo Nelson, Mary Astor as McHugh's girlfriend, Allen Jenkins and Barton MacLane as investigators hired by the opposition, Lyle Talbot as a reporter, Berton Churchill as the assistant manager of the Park Regis, and many more. This isn't Show People and it isn't even The Patsy and it doesn't deliver on every single joke it aims at but it's a fast paced riot with a lot of laughs and a lot of Warner stars strutting their stuff.
Their new big idea is to conjure up a composite picture of all the best parts of the best beauties they can find in the magazines to enter in a radio competition to find the most beautiful girl in the country for a modelling campaign. Unfortunately they soon find that they need to produce Dawn Glory herself. Companies are falling over themselves to hire her and hotshot publicist pilot Bingo Nelson, who's as daffy as she is, proposes to her on the air. Of course she doesn't exist, so they settle on turning their friendly chambermaid Loretta Dalrymple into Dawn Glory.
This is a great example of just how throwing money at something can create, if not the greatest film in the world, at least something fascinating to watch. It's a Cosmopolitan Picture, the company founded by William Randolph Hearst to create vehicles for his mistress Marion Davies and by this time he'd thankfully come to grips with the fact that while she wasn't a great actress she was a damn fine comedienne. She also somehow didn't have the egotism that she really ought to have had, and was quite happy to spend most of a film like this looking far less than her best, to the benefit of the picture.
Because Cosmopolitan Pictures had just moved across to the Warner Brothers lot, this movie is jam packed full with most of the Warners talent of the era. Beyond Pat O'Brien and Frank McHugh, there's Dick Powell as Bingo Nelson, Mary Astor as McHugh's girlfriend, Allen Jenkins and Barton MacLane as investigators hired by the opposition, Lyle Talbot as a reporter, Berton Churchill as the assistant manager of the Park Regis, and many more. This isn't Show People and it isn't even The Patsy and it doesn't deliver on every single joke it aims at but it's a fast paced riot with a lot of laughs and a lot of Warner stars strutting their stuff.
Friday, 5 January 2007
Marooned (1969)
Anyone who's seen a Police Academy movie knows that making George Gaynes the mission director of anything is likely to doom it to failure. In fact putting anyone from Police Academy in charge of anything probably isn't a good idea, but Commandant Lassard is a serious no no. Well in 1969, nobody, including the original novelist Martin Caidin, had a clue about Police Academy, so they went right ahead. Needless to say things go very wrong indeed, just as they did a year later in real life on Apollo 13, making this far more prophetic than anyone could realistically have expected.
Given that this is 1969, the year Neil Armstrong made his small step for man, this is completely believable. It's a good companion piece to Destination Moon, merely made twenty years later after some of this had become reality. The technology here looks awesomely real. It's by far the most real retro tech I've ever seen on film, but of course it wasn't retro tech at the time. What's most notably real is the way the whole plot kicks in. Three astronauts, Jim Pruett, Buzz Lloyd and Clayton Stone, had headed up to an orbital space station to become subjects in an experiment to see how seven months of living up there in weightlessness would affect human beings.
Gregory Peck plays the man who seems to really be in charge, Charles Keith, and he ends up with the unenviable task of trying to bring them down when their retros won't fire. He's more serious than the rest of the cast but then he's Gregory Peck. He's also very pessimistic about the chance of bringing them back and so doesn't even want to try until he's ordered to by the President of the United States. To be fair he's got a point, because the rescue ship hasn't been flown, Hurricane Alma is coming in and, most importantly, the astronauts have only 42 hours before they run out of oxygen. To say that they're up against it is about as huge an understatement as you could get.
The astronauts are respectively Richard Crenna, James Franciscus and a young Gene Hackman, two years after Bonnie and Clyde. Crenna is the reliable captain, Franciscus the active brain who makes things happen and Hackman the rebellious one who comes apart under the pressure. David Janssen, the lead in The Fugitive, the original one, leads the rescue mission. All of them are thoroughly distinctive, both in character and in portrayal, but it's elsewhere that the film falls down.
Given that this is by definition an action film without a heck of a lot of action, it really needed a lot of tense scenes to make up for it and they just aren't there. Really the film is almost entirely a single two plus hour tense scene without any relief at all until the final few seconds, and tension isn't something that can be sustained without at least something to grant relief. For all the grim realism here, Destination Moon was far better at being a science fiction story, a feat of heroism and a ripping yarn.
Given that this is 1969, the year Neil Armstrong made his small step for man, this is completely believable. It's a good companion piece to Destination Moon, merely made twenty years later after some of this had become reality. The technology here looks awesomely real. It's by far the most real retro tech I've ever seen on film, but of course it wasn't retro tech at the time. What's most notably real is the way the whole plot kicks in. Three astronauts, Jim Pruett, Buzz Lloyd and Clayton Stone, had headed up to an orbital space station to become subjects in an experiment to see how seven months of living up there in weightlessness would affect human beings.
Gregory Peck plays the man who seems to really be in charge, Charles Keith, and he ends up with the unenviable task of trying to bring them down when their retros won't fire. He's more serious than the rest of the cast but then he's Gregory Peck. He's also very pessimistic about the chance of bringing them back and so doesn't even want to try until he's ordered to by the President of the United States. To be fair he's got a point, because the rescue ship hasn't been flown, Hurricane Alma is coming in and, most importantly, the astronauts have only 42 hours before they run out of oxygen. To say that they're up against it is about as huge an understatement as you could get.
The astronauts are respectively Richard Crenna, James Franciscus and a young Gene Hackman, two years after Bonnie and Clyde. Crenna is the reliable captain, Franciscus the active brain who makes things happen and Hackman the rebellious one who comes apart under the pressure. David Janssen, the lead in The Fugitive, the original one, leads the rescue mission. All of them are thoroughly distinctive, both in character and in portrayal, but it's elsewhere that the film falls down.
Given that this is by definition an action film without a heck of a lot of action, it really needed a lot of tense scenes to make up for it and they just aren't there. Really the film is almost entirely a single two plus hour tense scene without any relief at all until the final few seconds, and tension isn't something that can be sustained without at least something to grant relief. For all the grim realism here, Destination Moon was far better at being a science fiction story, a feat of heroism and a ripping yarn.
Bowery Blitzkrieg (1941)
From 1937 to 1958, a collection of recurring characters went through a number of incarnations, from the Dead End Kids through the Little Tough Guys and the East Side Kids to the Bowery Boys. Many of the actors stayed consistent throughout most of the almost unbelievable 48 movies these characters made in total, especially Leo Gorcey, Bobby Jordan and Huntz Hall. These three appear here too as Muggs McGinnis, Danny Breslin and a dumb sidekick called Limpy respectively, regular characters all of them. They're East Side Kids at this point for the sixth time and as usual they're in trouble but trying to fight their way out.
These movies are formula stuff and this one is no exception, sixty minutes in length and doing little more except keeping us aware of the storyline for that hour. Danny is an up and coming boxer, representing the Police gym, but he's been sidetracked off the straight and narrow by a low expectation crook called Monk Martin. One local cop with a heart is engaged to Danny's sister, but he has better luck helping out Muggs to become his replacement. There's plenty of bluster, fights and lowlifes, as always, but Muggs comes good in the end.
Having seen a number of these movies, mostly courtesy of the wonderful value of Treeline Films DVD box sets, from our introduction to them in Dead End to a whole bunch of East Side Kids and Bowery Boys pictures, it's easy to see a lot of the same ol' same ol'. There's little here compared to some of the others but nothing really dumb either that tends to slip in there. It's literally just another East Side Kids movie, mostly focusing on Muggs but with a little bit of Danny too. A stunningly average entry for die hards only or viewers happy to spend a safe and forgettable hour in front of the screen. It worked perfectly for my lunch hour.
These movies are formula stuff and this one is no exception, sixty minutes in length and doing little more except keeping us aware of the storyline for that hour. Danny is an up and coming boxer, representing the Police gym, but he's been sidetracked off the straight and narrow by a low expectation crook called Monk Martin. One local cop with a heart is engaged to Danny's sister, but he has better luck helping out Muggs to become his replacement. There's plenty of bluster, fights and lowlifes, as always, but Muggs comes good in the end.
Having seen a number of these movies, mostly courtesy of the wonderful value of Treeline Films DVD box sets, from our introduction to them in Dead End to a whole bunch of East Side Kids and Bowery Boys pictures, it's easy to see a lot of the same ol' same ol'. There's little here compared to some of the others but nothing really dumb either that tends to slip in there. It's literally just another East Side Kids movie, mostly focusing on Muggs but with a little bit of Danny too. A stunningly average entry for die hards only or viewers happy to spend a safe and forgettable hour in front of the screen. It worked perfectly for my lunch hour.
Thursday, 4 January 2007
In a Lonely Place (1950)
It's good to see Bogie again. I've caught up so much on the work of unlikely Hollywood star Humphrey Bogart that I don't get too many opportunities to find ones that I haven't seen before. This isn't just a Bogart picture, it's a Nicholas Ray movie and it's a blistering film noir about Hollywood, made the same year as Sunset Boulevard.
Bogie plays Dixon Steele, a scriptwriter who only wants to write scripts he likes and who looks down at the hacks he calls popcorn salesmen. He's well known, seemingly well respected but highly volatile. He's intelligent and insightful but as grounded in reality as you'd expect from someone who defined the hardboiled detective over the previous decade. The script backs him up wonderfully and sparkles with snappy dialogue, perhaps the best he's had outside of The Big Sleep. When a kid asks him for his autograph, he asks if he knows who he is. When another kid says that he's nobody, he agrees with her. When an old friend of a cop tells him he got married, Bogie asks him why.
Steele unwittingly gets himself into a jam. He invites a hat check girl, played by an actress with the unfortunate name of Martha Stewart, home to tell him about a book he's supposed to turn into a screenplay, because she's read it and she's a complete moron like most of his audience. However soon after leaving his apartment she ends up dead in a canyon and Steele seems to be the only real suspect. He was the last person who saw her alive and he has a violent past, as detailed in quite a lot of pages of police records. He does have an alibi, a beautiful young actress who lives in the apartment opposite, and she's as hardboiled as he is, but they fall in love and so the police start to doubt her validity.
The beautiful young actress is Laurel Gray, excellently played by Gloria Grahame, who at this point was estranged from her husband, the director of the movie Nicholas Ray. She went on to marry one of his sons from a previous marriage. She is superb here and sparks with Bogart like nobody else I've seen, outside of Lauren Bacall naturally. On the strength of Crossfire three years earlier, she went on to be almost typecast in films noir for a decade and I can see why. She was Oscar nominated more than once and took the award home for The Bad and the Beautiful in 1952.
What really makes this film stand out amongst anything remotely similar is that none of these characters are morally one dimensionally. They all have depths and motivations that lead them down paths that even they don't necessary like. Bogart never did shy away from parts that weren't always honourable and Grahame became a film noir queen. I also particular liked Art Smith's role of Steele's agent Mel Lippman, which reminded me very much of what I'd read about Jean Harlow's agent, Arthur Landau, a devoted man who cleaned up every mess that came alone.
It's a great film and I'm sure a lot of that is due to the fact that it was made by Bogie's production company, Santana Productions, named after his beloved sailboat, one of sadly only five. While they aren't always this good, they're always interesting and far more so than most of the regular films that had more famous names and bigger budgets. The same applies for James Cagney's production company too and probably those of other famous actors who suddenly found them with a little more control and artistic freedom than they had previously been used to.
Bogie plays Dixon Steele, a scriptwriter who only wants to write scripts he likes and who looks down at the hacks he calls popcorn salesmen. He's well known, seemingly well respected but highly volatile. He's intelligent and insightful but as grounded in reality as you'd expect from someone who defined the hardboiled detective over the previous decade. The script backs him up wonderfully and sparkles with snappy dialogue, perhaps the best he's had outside of The Big Sleep. When a kid asks him for his autograph, he asks if he knows who he is. When another kid says that he's nobody, he agrees with her. When an old friend of a cop tells him he got married, Bogie asks him why.
Steele unwittingly gets himself into a jam. He invites a hat check girl, played by an actress with the unfortunate name of Martha Stewart, home to tell him about a book he's supposed to turn into a screenplay, because she's read it and she's a complete moron like most of his audience. However soon after leaving his apartment she ends up dead in a canyon and Steele seems to be the only real suspect. He was the last person who saw her alive and he has a violent past, as detailed in quite a lot of pages of police records. He does have an alibi, a beautiful young actress who lives in the apartment opposite, and she's as hardboiled as he is, but they fall in love and so the police start to doubt her validity.
The beautiful young actress is Laurel Gray, excellently played by Gloria Grahame, who at this point was estranged from her husband, the director of the movie Nicholas Ray. She went on to marry one of his sons from a previous marriage. She is superb here and sparks with Bogart like nobody else I've seen, outside of Lauren Bacall naturally. On the strength of Crossfire three years earlier, she went on to be almost typecast in films noir for a decade and I can see why. She was Oscar nominated more than once and took the award home for The Bad and the Beautiful in 1952.
What really makes this film stand out amongst anything remotely similar is that none of these characters are morally one dimensionally. They all have depths and motivations that lead them down paths that even they don't necessary like. Bogart never did shy away from parts that weren't always honourable and Grahame became a film noir queen. I also particular liked Art Smith's role of Steele's agent Mel Lippman, which reminded me very much of what I'd read about Jean Harlow's agent, Arthur Landau, a devoted man who cleaned up every mess that came alone.
It's a great film and I'm sure a lot of that is due to the fact that it was made by Bogie's production company, Santana Productions, named after his beloved sailboat, one of sadly only five. While they aren't always this good, they're always interesting and far more so than most of the regular films that had more famous names and bigger budgets. The same applies for James Cagney's production company too and probably those of other famous actors who suddenly found them with a little more control and artistic freedom than they had previously been used to.
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