Letty Lynton (1932)

Director: Clarence Brown
Writers: Wanda Tuchock, from a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes with dialogue and continuity by John Meehan
Stars: Joan Crawford, Robert Montgomery, Nils Asther, May Robson and Lewis Stone

This review is part of the Joan Crawford Blogathon blogathon hosted by In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood.

I had a blast taking part in the 1932 blogathon earlier this month, so had no intention of saying no when I got asked to take part in another one. This is to commemorate the work of Joan Crawford, so I wandered through her filmography looking to see where my gaps are. When I realised that Letty Lynton is the only film of hers from 1932 and 1933 that I hadn’t seen, synchronicity nodded its head at me. When I read up on it and realised why I hadn’t seen it, it became a must. For the Joan Crawford blogathon, hosted by the blog ‘In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood’, I’ll happily watch the Crawford movie that I’m not supposed to watch. Hey, what can I say? I’m a rebel. The reason I’m not supposed to watch it is because MGM, who made it in 1932, were taken to court for plaguarism and lost. The film hasn’t been released since so, like any other potential viewer, I was forced to trawl through the grey market and suffer through a digital rip from a bootleg VHS tape with poor quality visuals and notably crackly sound.

Here are the details as to why. Letty Lynton was written by Wanda Tuchock, a charter member of the Screen Writers Guild and one of maybe only two women to earn a directorial credit on a Hollywood film in the thirties: Finishing School, billed alongside George Nichols Jr. She based it on a recent novel by the prolific English novelist, Marie Belloc Lowndes, sister to Hilaire Belloc and author of The Lodger, which has been adapted to the screen many times, including by Alfred Hitchcock. In turn, Mrs Lowndes based it on the real murder case of Madeleine Smith, a Glaswegian socialite who is generally believed to have poisoned her secret lover with arsenic in 1857. He was Pierre Emile L’Angelier and the letters she wrote to him were found in his lodgings and caused her to be arrested and charged. There was much circumstantial evidence to point to Smith being the killer, but not enough to prove it, so the jury returned a verdict of ‘not proven’, a middle ground in Scotland between ‘innocent’ and ‘guilty’.

Such a prominent murder was bound to resonate and Mrs Lowndes wasn’t the only author to base a work on it. Two playwrights brought the case to the stage under the title Dishonored Lady. One was Edward Sheldon, whose highly successful work was often adapted to film in the teens and twenties; he had a huge hit with Romance in 1913, a play which ran for over a thousand nights in the West End and was adapted twice onto film: in 1920 with Doris Keane and again in 1930 with Greta Garbo. Perhaps because he was going blind because of crippling rheumatoid arthritis as of 1929, he started to collaborate with Margaret Ayer Barnes, a lady who took up writing to bide her time while recovering from a traffic accident which broke her back. She did pretty well at it; she won the Pulitzer Prize for her debut novel, Years of Grace. That was in 1931, after Sheldon had retired. Dishonored Lady was his last hurrah but just a beginning for her. It was also directly adapted to film, but much later, in 1947 with Hedy Lamarr.

Sheldon and Barnes took MGM to court because they claimed that the film stole from their play. I’m no lawyer, so much of what I read of the case law history makes little sense to me, but I believe that what sunk the studio was the dialogue, which presumably matched that in the play but not the novel. Tuchock wrote the script, but there’s a further credit for John Meehan’s ‘dialogue and continuity’. He was hardly a minor name either, having being Oscar-nominated for writing The Divorcee in 1930, but he may have been the main reason why this film got stuck in litigation. The playwrights demanded all the profits from the film, but they got a 20% cut of the net, given that movie stars contribute to profits too; this is notable because it marks the first time that a copyright infringement claim was settled like a patent infringement claim and MGM fought that all the way to the Supreme Court. However, they chose not to hear the case and that was that. It also locked in an injunction against the film, hence why we can’t see it.

And that’s rather frustrating today, whatever the quality of this particular film, which I was now even more eager to see. Just look at the people involved! It was directed by Clarence Brown, the pre-eminent director of women at MGM; he directed Greta Garbo in seven films and Joan Crawford in six, including this one. She was never a minor leading lady; she’d risen during the silents to play opposite actors of the calibre of Lon Chaney and successfully made the transition to sound. Her pre-codes had variable success but her infamous ‘box office poison’ era wouldn’t show up until the end of the decade; it surely can’t have hurt that she’d also married into Hollywood royalty in the form of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Robert Montgomery was her co-star in 1929’s Untamed, his first picture as a leading man and her first sound film; this could be seen as a thematic sequel in some ways, given that the pair meet and fall in love on an ocean liner travelling to New York in both films. Add in Nils Asther, Lewis Stone and May Robson and it’s a must see.

I found that it actually is a must see, though it didn’t appear that way for quite a while. I was annoyed by it for perhaps almost half an hour, as nobody in the story appeared to have any substance at all. Crawford plays the title character, a carefree socialite rather like the flappers she played in so many late silents. The Lyntons are rich, but Letty has escaped them to fritter away her time down in Montevideo in the arms of a quintessential Latin lover by the name of Emile Renaul. He’s played by the capable Nils Asther, who had frittered away time with Joan Crawford in a number of those late silents, such as Our Dancing Daughters. He’s a sleazy character with a sleazy accent and a sleazy choice of poetic phrasing: ‘When I hold you in my arms, even the memory of everything is gone,’ is but one example of many. He’s also creepy because he won’t take no for an answer. ‘This is the finish!’ she tells him in her hotel room. ‘You will never leave me, Letty!’ is his blind response. Next day, she’s on her way to the cruise liner heading north.

To highlight how insubstantial Letty is, let’s look at how long it takes her to move on from mad and passionate Emile. Miranda, her maid, does float the idea that there might be someone interesting on board and Letty does say, ‘I hope not,’ but, before the door to her stateroom is even closed, she spies Robert Montgomery just across the hall and we’re off and running with the usual romantic shipboard entanglements. There’s a nice scene as both Miranda and Jerry Darrow, Montgomery’s character, pay the steward to sit the pair together at dinner. They seem to be a perfect match, the pair as insubstantial as each other. She’s from Long Island, while he’s from Boston. ‘Mayflower?’ she asks. ‘Sure,’ he replies. His father is a rubber company; hers is a chemical works. He makes up wild tales about his adventures in Africa, as if he’s Baron Munchausen, while she hangs on every word. I liked the improvisational feel of the dialogue, but felt nothing for either of them. At this point, I was hoping they were on the Titanic with an iceberg ahead.

Fortunately, things settle down and the pair of them start to exhibit signs of being real human beings. There’s a interesting scene where they try to find deckchairs that aren’t on decks being swabbed down with hoses, as they’re the beautiful people and things like this aren’t supposed to happen to people like them. It’s at Christmas, though, that we start to feel for Letty, as while everyone else is enjoying the organised on board celebrations, she’s out on the balcony with tears ready to flow. Maybe her story about her father being shot at Christmas was true but, whatever the cause, it’s the first time she’s been truly honest and the first time that we actually see the real Letty Lynton who’s been hiding behind her fabulous wardrobe until now. Her gowns, and she has a large collection of them, were designed by Adrian and they’re impressive, even for someone as far from a fashion plate as I am. Macy’s reproduced ‘the Letty Lynton dress’, selling fifty thousand copies of it, and that isn’t even the best one she wears on board ship.

When the real Letty Lynton emerges from her carefully fashioned facade, it shows just what Joan Crawford could do. Never mind the first twenty minutes, in which she’s insubstantial fluff, the 1932 equivalent of Kim Kardashian, it’s the last hour that shows her talent and it begins out there on the balcony fighting away the tears at Christmas. Reality firmly introduces itself here, first with a proposal from Darrow who has known her all of two weeks and then with the appearance of sleazy Emile Renaul (remember him?) at the New York dock waiting for her to arrive. ‘I’ve got to keep those two men from meeting,’ she tells Miranda, but this is a long way from a screwball comedy; this has just turned from a romance into a psychological thriller. I don’t know what depression era slang called a stalker, but she’s got one of those right in her face and Louise Closser Hale memorably sticking out her tongue when he turns the other way isn’t going to be enough to get rid of him. Now we can see how the source material is going to apply!

The film’s structure becomes a little awkward, as we’re introduced to people, like May Robson as Letty’s grounded mother and the new faces to me of Walter Walker and Emma Dunn as Jerry’s jovial parents, while Emile starts to threaten. Nils Asther comes close to stealing the second half, immensely surprising to me given that he was as insubstantial and annoying as Letty in Montevideo. It has to be said that he’s a very believable ladykiller, impressive given that he was ‘unabashedly gay’ in real life, as Wikipedia would have it. Then again, he’d played a similar part before in Our Dancing Daughters, in which he becomes a jealous and angry husband to a flapper who chooses her party animal friends over him, friends like Joan Crawford in the picture which really made her a star. It gets hard in this film to remember the suave and jovial Montgomery when Asther slaps a huge kiss on her and she slaps a big slap on him. ‘There’s no love for you but mine,’ he insists and our memories deliver every movie ever made for the Lifetime Channel.

It’s hard not to spoil a film when the bits that constitute spoilers are the ones taken from real life and I’ve already introduced that case as an explanation of why we officially can’t see this film and why I had to see it anyway. However, I can emphasise that there is some serious power to the final scenes, which are reliant on more actors than merely Crawford and Montgomery. I can also say that this is a quintessential pre-code, that brief era of black and white Hollywood which exhibited freedom in a way shocking to us today, used as we are to the golden age under the hefty restrictions of the Production Code. Let’s just say that this story could not have been told in the code era, at least not like this, and when Hollywood tried it, with Hedy Lamarr in that adaptation of Sheldon and Barnes’s Dishonored Lady, the Hays Office required serious cuts which excised characters and cities, a ‘night of sordid passion’ and every suggestion that the leading lady had even thought about murder. Letty Lynton it sure ain’t.

And with that comment, I should add that I’d really like to see Letty Lynton in a nice, restored, official release, as unlikely as that is, given the federal injunction still in effect. Perhaps MGM could look the other way while someone records the 35mm print digitally and leaks it to YouTube. Fans of Crawford and Montgomery deserve to be able to see this film, as does anyone who remembers Nils Asther. I’ve read people citing the scene surrounding Emile’s death as the finest piece of acting Crawford ever gave. Given that she won a deserved Oscar for Mildred Pierce, that’s high praise, but it’s understandable because she blisters through it with attitude and it’s not the only scene of power that she has. Nowadays, however, it’s Adrian’s costume design that is remembered most. Many of the great MGM names worked on this, like Cedric Gibbons and Douglas Shearer, but their work isn’t recognisable in a bootleg with horrible sound while Adrian’s dresses are. But how much better would they look in a restoration? Sadly, we’ll have to imagine.

The Night of the Grizzly (1966)

Director: Joseph Pevney
Writer: Warren Douglas
Stars: Clint Walker, Martha Hyer, Keenan Wynn and Nancy Kulp

‘Big Jim Cole had come to the rim of Hell and nobody but nobody was going to push him over!’ screams the tagline on the poster. It sure doesn’t look that way as his wagon travels through gorgeous countryside into a town called Hope to claim his inheritance of a ranch. 150 miles cross-country in a wagon seat isn’t remotely as comfortable as they make it look, but hey, welcome to Hollywood, erm, Hope. Jim is played by a television legend, Clint Walker, who had played the title character on Cheyenne for seven seasons. He is perfect for this role: he’s tall, strong and softly spoken, he looks believably tough with his shirt off (which it often is) and he can backhand Ron Ely with style. Ely, famous for playing both Tarzan and Doc Savage, was 6’ 4½” tall, but Walker still had an inch and a half on him. Walker had his work cut out for him here, with a host of actors of all ages ready to steal the film out from under him, but he holds on to it with a quiet authority that backs up his character’s background as a former United States marshal.

Many of those scene-stealing members of the supporting cast were also best known for television. Nancy Kulp runs the local store, which also includes a café, a pool hall and almost anything else that might be needed in Hope; she’s easily best known as Miss Jane Hathaway, Milburn Drysdale’s secretary in The Beverly Hillbillies. Her name in this story is Wilhelmina but Big Jim’s right hand man calls her Bill. The one thing she doesn’t stock is, well, stock, so Cole has to go to Hazel Squires for his cows and pigs; she’s played by Ellen Corby, another actress who’s fundamentally known for one role, of Grandma Walton in The Waltons. Both of them play pretty much the same parts here, even if the characters have different names. Only Ron Ely gets to do anything different: he was known as much for The Aquanauts as Tarzan on TV, but his role here as the spoiled brat of a son of the local villain isn’t remotely similar to either. It’s odd watching him not be in charge, but he has fun as Tad Curry, a pain in the ass hoodlum who’s always in trouble.

The story isn’t particularly original. In fact, it bears many similarities to Terror in a Texas Town, which I covered in March in honour of Sterling Hayden, though there’s no political undercurrent to be found here. Cole has come to Hope to claim a ranch that his dad Charlie won from Jed Curry in a card game; he’s brought his family along to work it with him and he’s keen to get on with it. When he discovers that there’s a $500 loan against the property, with another $175 in interest, he pays it without hesitation, though it’s most of his money and he hasn’t even seen the place yet. ‘I don’t need to see it,’ he says. It turns out to be not much to look at but it’s 640 acres of prime land and there’s another man in town who wants it badly: Jed Curry, its former owner, who wants it for his sons, Tad and Cal, the local troublemakers. He’s little different except that he has common sense, grit and control to go with their greed, and he’s played to gloriously barking effect by Keenan Wynn, who would have been a hundred years old today: 27th July.

Now, given that this is a time honoured framework for a western, you might wonder why it’s called The Night of the Grizzly. Well, in and amongst the usual subplots of honest man against the odds, redemption through young love and the retired lawman’s old life catching up with him, not to mention that old faithful of a little girl discovering what a skunk is the hard way, we have a new one: Old Satan. Regis Toomey gets to talk up this critter as Cotton Benson, the town’s banker, and he does it well. ‘1,500 odd pounds of the meanest, wickedest animal this side of Hades,’ is just introduction. ‘If that beast ain’t Lucifer in person, he sure is first cousin,’ he suggests. And just in case Big Jim thinks that it’s just another grizzly bear, he focuses in. ‘He’s got the heart of a cougar and he can out-think any man ever born,’ he explains. ‘He kills just for the wicked fun of it.’ Now, that’s the sort of build-up we expect to get for a movie called The Night of the Grizzly! Old Satan has terrorised Hope for years and Big Jim’s place is next on his list.

I enjoyed this film from the outset because of the simplicity inherent in the town of Hope. Every character’s motivation is written across his face and with his very first actions. Big Jim is a good man with a good family, even if his son Charlie is a handful and his young daughter Gypsy is a character and a half. His compadre and former deputy, Sam Potts, is the standard western sidekick but he’s immediately set upon by the fact that Hope is in a dry county. He finds that out at Bill’s general store, just as we find out that she’s fallen for him at first sight. We meet Tad and Cal there, all ready to steal Sam’s money on the pretext of supplying him with a bottle of illicit liquor. Their dad Jed is a bad man but one that’s good at being bad; everyone in town knows that he owns it, even if they’d like to forget. The banker is a decent sort, who would help anyone in need, but he knows who the principal shareholder is. There’s even a local odd job man, played by Jack Elam, who’s happiest sleeping on a bench outside Bill’s store.

We know who each of these folk are and what they’re like just by looking at them. The script by Warren Douglas, who gets a brief appearance as a minister, isn’t keen on surprising us and it wouldn’t be as effective as it is without the right folk in these parts. An impressive amount of kudos needs to go to the casting director here, rather than the writer. This is late for Douglas, who appeared on the big screen for the last time after a minor acting career that went back to 1938; he had one TV movie left in him, 1973’s The Red Pony. In the fifties, he gradually switched over to writing, moving from features to television by the end of the decade. He was best known for western shows, having written episodes for most of the big ones: Bonanza, Gunsmoke and The High Chaparral, not to mention ten episodes of Cheyenne, starring Clint Walker. This feels like it could easily have been a couple of those TV episodes, one about the cold war between Big Jim and Jed Curry over the ranch and another about the search for a killer grizzly bear.

I didn’t enjoy this for the story; I watched it for the characters and for how far into their skins the actors got. I felt like I’d arrived in Hope along with the Coles and so I had a stake in what was going on. It didn’t hurt that I watched in Phoenix, AZ, where lines of dialogue like Hazel Squires’s, ‘It’s gonna be a long, mean summer,’ ring very true indeed. Of course, that’s a harbinger of doom if ever I’ve heard one and, sure enough, Satan comes visiting that very night, breaking into Big Jim’s barn and right back out again, after Cole shoots at him. The brief attack leaves Duncan, the ranch’s prize bull, dead. He’s only the first victim, however, as more promptly add up and gradually move the story towards a quest to rid the town of this 1,500 pound menace. The reward put up by Jed Curry plays nicely into the rest of the story, prompting Big Jim to join the hunt to earn that cash and save his ranch, but mostly it’s about a battle between the retired marshal and a man who figured strongly within that career, Cass Dowdy.

I chose The Night of the Grizzly as a celebration of Keenan Wynn’s career and he does a stellar job as Jed Curry, clearly the villain of the piece and not a man to cross in Hope, but also one who gains a little sympathy from us because of how much trouble Tad and Cal keep getting into, all of which he ends up responsible for cleaning up. I wanted more Jed Curry, because Wynn made sure that he played him differently to every other actor in the film, speaking quietly but with menace until barking out a line for emphasis. Unfortunately, he’s the villain in a movie where Satan the grizzly bear outweighs him by over a ton and doesn’t care what screen time he ends up with. It would have been easier to remove that grizzly from the script than any other component and, without it, Jed Curry’s part would have bulked up considerably. It’s fair to say that while Cole and Dowdy are out in the mountains tracking a killer bear, I was still thinking of what Curry might have been getting up to back in town.

Wynn had a long and interesting career, but not one with a quintessential role because he was so relentlessly versatile. I know him best from his role as Col Bat Guano in Dr Strangelove, but have previously reviewed him as memorable characters in films as diverse as Shack Out on 101, Bikini Beach and Battle Circus; others might remember him best for titles like The Great Race, Annie Get Your Gun or Son of Flubber. He was a third generation actor, with many family members in entertainment. His grandfather, Frank Keenan, was a New York stage actor and theatre manager who found his way to Hollywood, debuting in The Coward in 1915 and making over forty pictures. His daughter Hilda was a minor actress, but her husband, Ed Wynn, was a vaudeville clown who had his own TV show. He encouraged his son’s career and both Ed and Keenan Wynn appeared in Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight. Keenan’s son was a screenwriter, Tracy Keenan Wynn, who wrote The Longest Yard, and his granddaughter, Jessica Keenan Wynn, is a stage actress.

But I can only review what actually happens, not what plays out in my mind while the movie is going on, and what happens is the rekindling of old grudges between Cole, who needs the reward money, and Dowdy, whom Curry hires to make sure he doesn’t get it. Nothing that happens in the last third of the film carries any surprises, with each little plot twist either telegraphed or obvious. However Walker is as solid in the mountains as he was on the plains and Leo Gordon is suitably imposing as his opponent. Just like Walker was the epitome of the tall and quietly spoken western hero, Gordon is the epitome of the tall and quietly spoken western villain. He didn’t have the quirky performance tricks of a Jack Palance or, in this picture, a Keenan Wynn, but he had the look and the feel and what he himself called ‘a craggy-ass face.’ He exuded menace just by standing up, even if his stocky 6’ 2” frame was a full four inches short of Walker’s, and his deep voice just added to that tone. You simply knew he wasn’t anyone to mess with.

Of course, Victoria Paige Meyerink didn’t seem like anyone to mess with either, but in a rather different way, given that she was a six year old girl, the Coles’ youngest. Kevin Brodie, as her screen brother Charlie, was a more seasoned actor, with four features to his name already, even though he was only fourteen. Candy Moore certainly caught the eye more as cousin Meg, but she had little to do except turn green in a bizarre effects shot when Tad Curry suckers her into drinking a glass of moonshine instead of punch. Meyerink got all the best scenes, including a bunch with Jack Elam, after she decides to just lie down on the next bench over. She’s Rosebud and he’s Champeen and they’re an unlikely pair who genuinely seemed to hit it off. Little girls tend to either fade into the background or steal every scene they’re in; my guess, from the amount of them that Meyerink ended up with, is that the director, Joseph Pevney, was in no doubt about her falling into the latter category. She comes closest to stealing the show from Walker.

One prominent member of the cast I haven’t mentioned yet is Don Haggerty, who plays Big Jim’s sidekick, Sam Potts. In the time-honoured tradition of westerns, he’s as blustery as his boss is calm, but he gets quite a bit of opportunity here, including a superbly awkward romantic angle to work with Bill. I couldn’t help but see a huge amount of irony in his performance in this film, though it isn’t actually warranted. I’d read that Don Haggerty was the father of Dan Haggerty, who went on to great fame as Grizzly Adams, a connection underlined by the latter accidentally receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame that had been intended for the former. The family connection seems obvious, especially when Don interacts with Satan, and extends far beyond their respective bushy beards. However, I checked with Arizona’s official western film historian, Charlie LeSueur, who confirms that they weren’t actually related! Dan Haggerty’s father really was a Don Haggerty, but he wasn’t this Don Haggerty, so the irony is coincidental.

I tried to find out who played the bear too, but the information doesn’t seem to be findable online. I don’t even know if it was male or female, so I’ll use ‘he’ and hope for accuracy. Whoever he was did a decent job, but not up to the level that we would soon come to expect from various TV shows and films starring the non-related Dan Haggerty. I didn’t buy into the hype Cotton Benson spins up for him, perhaps because he looks like a demonic teddy bear on the poster. He does turn out to be a big bear, but he really isn’t put to the sort of use that we might expect a big bear in a movie called The Night of the Grizzly to be put. The closest Joseph Pevney got to the horror genre was The Strange Door a decade and a half earlier, starring Charles Laughton and Boris Karloff. He did direct genre material, such as a fifth of Star Trek’s episodes, but the grizzly side of this story needed horror treatment and he didn’t have a clue. Title aside, the grizzly is merely a distraction from a well cast and well acted but routine western drama. Goodnight, Satan!

The Dark Horse (1932)

Director: Alfred E Green
Writer: Meville Crossman
Stars: Warren William, Bette Davis and Guy Kibbee

This review is part of the Hot & Bothered: The Films of 1932 blogathon hosted by Once Upon a Screen and CineMaven's Essays from the Couch. Posts for 9th July can be found at this page at Once Upon a Screen and posts for 10th July are at this page at Essays from the Couch.

I’ve taken part in blogathons before, but it’s been a while. The idea is simple: someone sets a theme, a bevy of bloggers pick a title that fits and each writes a new review to be posted, all in a flurry on the same day. I simply couldn’t resist Hot & Bothered: The Films of 1932, though, when I saw it mentioned in CineMaven’s Essays from the Couch, because it’s about my favourite year in American film. I’m not saying that there aren’t better years (hello, 1939, you ‘golden year of Hollywood’, you), but 1932 was surely the most honest. It marks the point where the studios had firmly figured out how to use sound, which had come in back in the twenties but not killed the silent movie until Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights wrapped up that era only a year earlier. It also marks the point where a whole new era really kicked into gear: the pre-code. I’ve talked about this a lot at Apocalypse Later but, for new eyes, it’s a brief point in time between the silent era and the imposition of the Production Code in 1934 which stopped all the fun on screen.

I love pre-codes because their stories feel so alive and so edgy for black and white film that my brain often rebels and believes I’m in a parallel universe where Americans actually acknowledge sex as well as violence. To over-generalise, pre-code heroes were all gangsters and pre-code heroines were all prostitutes; women had power, the races mixed and criminals tended to get away with things (or, at least, the tacked on Hollywood endings were so absurdly tacked on that you could often blink and miss them). It was the time of unjustly forgotten stars like Richard Barthelmess, Joan Blondell and Lee Tracy. It marked the arrivals on screen of stars we know such as Barbara Stanwyck, Clark Gable and Bette Davis. And it was the playground of my favourite actor, the unparalleled Warren William, little remembered today but the quintessential pre-code actor. He made two films in the twenties and two more in 1931, then took over in 1932 with no less than eight, including gems like The Mouthpiece, Skyscraper Souls and The Match King.

I chose The Dark Horse from these eight because I haven’t seen it in a decade, it’s a Warren William picture that I haven’t reviewed at Apocalypse Later before and it plays into the current political climate perfectly. We find ourselves in an unnamed state in a US where the Conservatives battle the Progressives and a governor’s seat is up for grabs. The Progressive Convention is deadlocked for a fourth day because White and Wilson are tied and neither can seem to get an edge. So, the Wilson camp tries the well oiled political move of shenanigans, nominating the dark horse of the title to split the opposition’s vote. How about Zachary Hicks? That seems like a great political name! Nobody’s heard of him, but he’ll do! The catch is that the White camp backs the play just to avoid Wilson getting in, so Hicks wins the primary and both sides try to figure out who he is. Well, he’s Guy Kibbee and he’s asleep in the audience, having taken up his neighbour’s sarcastic advice to cut off his own shoes to let his aching feet breathe.

Kibbee was born to play this role, of a jolly fool who has slid through the halls of power without really understanding them. Hicks was a county coroner, but he resigned because he didn’t like his rest being constantly interrupted. Kibbee specialised in this sort of part, inept but good natured support for the leads, and Hollywood was happy to put him to work; never mind William’s eight, Guy Kibbee made eighteen pictures in 1932 alone, though he was rarely the lead himself. When he was, in films like 1934’s Merry Wives of Reno, the results were hilarious; RKO eventually gave him his own series and he made six Scattergood Baines movies in the early forties. Most people remember him from big pictures like Mr Smith Goes to Washington, in which he also played a governor, but for me it’s a whole slew of pre-codes: musicals like 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933 and Footlight Parade and other films as varied as Two Seconds, Crooner and Lady for a Day. And, of course, this one, in which he plays the title character if not the lead role.

The lead is Warren William, playing Hal S Blake (‘the S is for Samson’), because when the Progressive backroom boys realise what a mess they’ve created for themselves, their secretary, Kay Russell, tells them that they need to hire him to get them out of it. She’s a very young Bette Davis, who, like William and Kibbee (excluding the odd silent supporting role in both instances), had kicked off her career in 1931 and stepped into high gear in 1932: she made four in the former and nine in the latter, including Hell’s House, So Big! and 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, not to mention Three on a Match, with its dream cast for a pre-code that included William, Blondell and Humphrey Bogart, among others. She’s still learning her trade here, not apparently as comfortable as her co-stars (she hated her early output for Warner Brothers) but still with an obvious promise that, of course, she more than delivered on. She manages to steal some scenes too and it wasn’t easy to steal scenes from Warren William in a pre-code!

She plays Blake up sensationally as the ‘greatest campaign manager in the world’, ‘the greatest manipulator of public opinion this country has ever produced’ and ‘the fastest worker in the world’. The latter is quickly apparent because when the committee get to his jail cell (as he’s been locked up for non-payment of alimony), he already has the whole block eating out of his hand and even singing a campaign song for Zachary Hicks that he’s written on the fly! Of course, he doesn’t know who Hicks is either so, after he arrives at Progressive headquarters and inadvertently puts the candidate to work putting up his own campaign sign, he’s in for a shock. But, hey, this is Warren William. His assistant, Joe, played by Warners regular Frank McHugh, describes Hicks to his face as the ‘champion seacow of this planet’ and is promptly lost for words when he discovers who he really is; Blake, on the other hand, doesn’t miss a beat after a similar mistake, charms Hicks in a moment and has him volunteer to go right back and fix that sign.

What William did better than anyone else in the pre-code era and, frankly, in the entirety of American film, is to keep our support even when he’s the bad guy. And he played real bad guys, not just what we might call anti-heroes today. He specialised in ruthless businessmen, who don’t get more ruthless than he does in The Match King; cunning lawyers, even before he brought Perry Mason to life on the big screen for four movies in the mid-thirties; and outright conmen, such as the outrageous fake psychic he plays in The Mind Reader. In my review of that picture, I wrote that imposing the Production Code on William was ‘like declawing a wildcat’ and I stand by that. His career went on, but it wasn’t the same and couldn’t have been: most of the tools in his toolbox had become illegal and the parts he played best were no longer written. The pre-codes were made during the height of the depression and he played the roles ‘you love to hate’. However, he had such charisma and fearless optimism that they’re roles ‘you hate to love’ too.

A quintessential William moment here arrives during the first public debate between Zachary Hicks and his competitor, the Hon William A Underwood. Because Hicks has as much political savvy as the shoes he cut up, Blake has him memorise one of Lincoln’s speeches that paints him as a man of the people, dumb but honest, in keeping with his campaign slogan of ‘Hicks from the Sticks’. Unfortunately, Underwood beats him to the punch by launching into precisely the same speech, so Blake, as sharp as ever, takes the stage to expose Underwood as an unashamed plaguarist, accusing him of ‘the vilest of crimes, filching thoughts from a dead man’s grave’. We ought to be horrified, watching a campaign manager destroy the opposing candidate for doing exactly what he had trained his own candidate to do, but we’re with him all the way. Of course, this is merely the 1930s version of the attack ad, a polite creature indeed to what we see during prominent American election campaigns today.

So much of this feels familiar as we move steadily towards the political conventions that will soon provide America with the best opportunity to vote ‘none of the above’ that history has perhaps ever seen. The script was written by Courtney Terrett and Darryl F Zanuck, the future head of Twentieth Century Fox, under the pseudonym of Melville Crossman, and, for all the trappings of the 1930s, it feels remarkably timeless. If they had a time machine to hand, they could have based Hal S Blake on Corey Lewandowski, who ran Donald Trump’s presidential campaign until last month. Early in his career, he worked for Congressman Bob Ney, known today for a thirty month sentence he received for corruption. Lewandowski was arrested too, for apparently smuggling a gun and ammo inside a laundry bag into a Congress office building. He ran a senate reelection campaign that smeared the opposition as a terrorist. He was a controversial lobbyist for years and used violence to handle press and protestors when working for Trump.

All of these things would be believable actions for Hal S Blake, who goes to incredible lengths towards the end of the film to block his candidate from being arrested in the final days of the campaign in a sting set up by the floundering Underwood camp. Even in more personal actions outside the campaign itself, he stoops to some serious depths. Maybelle is his ex-wife, the one who had him locked up at the beginning of the film for non-payment of alimony. He’s been slipping on that again, so she shows up at campaign headquarters to collect and he actually goes to his girlfriend to get the cash, ostensibly for ‘a little bill I overlooked’. As you might expect for a character played by Bette Davis, she’s sharp and sees through much of what he does, to the degree that she continues to rebuff his proposals of marriage because she knows that he’s all about the chase rather than the catch; she’s more than happy to be chased but not willing to be caught in matrimony, as Blake would move on once she was conquered, as if she were a mountain.

Maybelle is played by Vivienne Osborne, yet another star to shine with the advent of sound. She’d made a number of silent films in the early twenties, but had effectively retired as of 1922 until she returned in 1931; almost half of her filmography was made in the pre-code era, including such textbook pre-codes as Husband’s Holiday, Two Seconds or Week-End Marriage, stories that revolve around infidelity, the death penalty and working women (no, not that kind, for a change). What’s notable here is that Maybelle is no more ruthless than her ex-husband but she comes off emphatically as the villain of the piece while he spins his way into the hero’s role. If you examine the story, they’re really no different. Blake does what he does to get Hicks elected, however unethical those actions might be; Maybelle does what she does for no better reason, just the old one of money. Our judgements are based on performance alone: William was best as the used car salesman who charms our socks off, but Osborne as the scheming ‘other woman’.

William dominated every pre-code he was in but in very different ways to contemporaries like Cagney, Bogart or Robinson. Take a look at an early post-code, The Case of the Lucky Legs, the third of his Perry Mason movies, to see the perfect example of that. He’s a whirlwind of energy and it’s often difficult to acknowledge that anyone else is even in the film. He’s somewhat restrained here, by his standards at least, and he leads a strong cast indeed. Bette Davis, second billed, could have been given a much more substantial role, given that Kay Russell is clearly a very capable young lady, but she does what she can with it before it falls into mush. It’s not fair to dismiss all her roles before, say, Of Human Bondage in 1934, but they certainly tended towards less substance. Guy Kibbee was perfect as Zachary Hicks and it’s surprising how well he enforces his presence here, given that he’s inherently playing a character easy to overlook. Frank McHugh is the capable support he always was; I often watch early Warners just for him and Allen Jenkins.

Pre-codes are a rabbit hole. They’re entirely unknown to most of the film-going public and even firm fans of classic Hollywood are much more likely to watch pictures from the later thirties or forties. However, once discovered, they have a tendency to suck us in because they’re a door to a different world, one that entices all the more because it doesn’t feel like it fits. Hollywood’s golden age did a great job of hiding reality, spinning stories that took us away from the everyday. Pre-codes show us that reality, often wildly. I frequently say that pre-codes contain things that we don’t expect to see in black and white and that applies to more than just the outrageous titles like Freaks, Kongo and Island of Lost Souls or Baby Face, Female and Red-Headed Woman. It also applies to social stories like Wild Boys of the Road, Gabriel Over the White House and I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang; comedies like Duck Soup, I’m No Angel and Peach-O-Reno; and musicals like 42nd Street, Footlight Parade and Gold Diggers of 1933. Add to that list anything with Warren William.

Lady in a Cage (1964)

Director: Walter Grauman
Writer: Luther Davis
Stars: Olivia de Havilland, James Caan, Jennifer Billingsley, Rafael Campos, William Swan, Jeff Corey and Ann Sothern

I’ve been working my centennial project for half a year now and it’s been fascinating to pluck interesting films from the careers of important cinematic names to celebrate what would have been their hundredth birthdays. Today, for the first time, I get to pluck an interesting film from the career of an important cinematic name to celebrate what actually is her hundredth birthday. Olivia de Havilland turns one hundred today and the world of film has wished her all the very best. Born in Japan of British parents, she was a major name in the thirties, not only for Errol Flynn movies like Captain Blood, The Charge of the Light Brigade and The Adventures of Robin Hood, but of the quintessential Hollywood blockbuster of the era, Gone with the Wind. In the forties, the blockbusters gave way to more focused dramas, like To Each Their Own, The Snake Pit and The Heiress; she received an Academy Award nomination for each of those three and won for two of them, losing the middle one to Jane Wyman for Johnny Belinda.

It’s easy to argue that the longer her career ran, the more interesting her film choices became. Never mind all those sweet young things she played in her early films, there are so many fascinating roles later on that I had to debate myself over which of a bunch of them I should select to review. I dismissed Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte as too well known, but could easily have picked That Lady, in which she wears an eyepatch; the Oscar-nominated Not as a Stranger; or especially The Dark Mirror, a crime thriller in which she plays twins. In the end I plumped for Lady in a Cage, a surprisingly forward looking thriller from 1964 that feels like a commentary on the present and future state of Hollywood. It’s very much a product of its time but its approach to story often feels like it could reach cinemas this year, even as it’s set in a location that seems like a throwback to the old days. Put together, that makes for a schizophrenic tone that fascinates me and makes me want to read more into it than perhaps is actually there.

As it begins, there’s no mistaking the movie for anything but the product of sixties Hollywood. The opening credits sequence shifts between Saul Bass style animation and striking black and white photography, accompanied by a staccato jazz score. The imagery is deliberately dark. A couple make out in a car to the radio accompaniment of an overblown evangelical preacher lady, eager to tap into the cold war fear of the nation. ‘Have we an anti-Satan missile?’ she screeches. A young coloured girl drags her rollerskate up and down the leg of a passed out bum. A keg is thrown off the roof of a building celebrating the 4th of July. Most notably, there’s a dead dog in the street with what seems like everyone in the world driving past bumper to bumper but not a one of them stopping. Everything screams heat and disinterest. We’re very clearly shown an amoral modern world before we pop up a driveway into the old fashioned house of Mrs Cornelia Hilyard, a house that could have been in a Hollywood movie of three decades earlier.

Cornelia is a fascinating character from the outset, played by de Havilland, of course. She’s set up superbly by scriptwriter Luther Davis in textbook style. We’re introduced to her through the apparent suicide note of her grown up son, prompting us to expect a domineering tyrant rather than the sweet old lady who wouldn’t say boo to a goose that we then meet. She walks with the aid of a cane, because she broke her hip the previous year; she gets up and down stairs through the use of a personal elevator, which also highlights her financial well-being. She seems to be an incessantly cheerful sort, even while pondering on the morality of buying into armament stocks because of all the war talk on the news. So she’s a character of rare substance: tough but frail, someone used to power who has been relegated to the ranks of the powerless. That’s only emphasised when her son leaves for the weekend and accidentally bumps a ladder into an electric cable and sparks (pun not intended) a power outage to her house alone.

The title has two meanings. The first is literal, as Cornelia finds herself stranded inside her lift cage, stuck between floors with her son gone for the weekend and only a book, a portable radio and a vase of flowers for company. The second is metaphorical, as her attempts to communicate with the outside world by ringing an alarm only attracts unwelcome attention, suggesting that her nice house is as much of a cage as her elevator, the world outside not the helpful one she imagines but a dangerous one that only wants to rage. Initially, the alarm she triggers, which rings outside above a sign reading, ‘Elevator emergency: please notify police,’ finds only an alcoholic thief with mental health issues to break in and see what he can find. He’s George L Brady Jr, better known to one and all as ‘Repent’. After one run to sell Cornelia’s toaster to the local junkyard, he comes back for more with Sade, a faded whore he owed money to. They’re played by Jeff Corey and Ann Sothern, character actors to de Havilland’s old Hollywood star.

If the film at this point was highlighting how method actors such as Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift were playing lead roles in the sixties like they were character parts instead, we’re about to meet the future in the form of a trio of thugs led by James Caan in his first credited role (he had made a brief appearance as a soldier in Irma la Douce the previous year). While Repent and Sade are morally repellent, their actions do make sense. He’s an alcoholic who has clearly suffered for his addiction and she’s a prostitute in a cheap apartment. Both of them have dug their own holes but see a way to climb out of them in the stuff that’s all over Cornelia’s house free for the taking given that she’s stuck in a cage and can’t do anything to stop them. When Randall, Essie and Elaine arrive, having followed Repent from the junkyard, they have no such explainable logic to guide their actions. They’re the epitome of the famous dialogue from The Wild One: ‘What are you rebelling against,’ someone asks Brando. ‘Whaddya got?’ he replies.

In fact, that would actually be more depth than this violent trio get. Given how carefully all three major characters thus far have been introduced, Luther Davis clearly crafted these young thugs without any background at all. We don’t know where they come from and we don’t know what drives them, though, frankly, neither do they. They don’t feel like they belong in the picture we’re watching, more like characters who travelled back in time from the exploitation cinema of the seventies or even from something as recent as The Purge. Their connection to 1964 is only through their style: Caan is clearly trying to be Brando with all the fibre of his being and Jennifer Billingsley, who plays Elaine, tapped into the same wildness as Ann-Margret did the same year in Kitten with a Whip. Oddly, it’s the much younger looking Rafael Campos, playing Essie, who was most experienced at the time: Billingsley was brand new and Caan was earning credit one but Campos had been acting in film and on television since 1955’s Blackboard Jungle.

You can write the rest of the script if you have a background in three distinct eras of Hollywood film: the golden age of the thirties, epitomised by the polite de Havilland and her elegant time capsule of a house; the character-based drama of the fifties and sixties, highlighted by Corey, Sothern and their grounded characters from the bad side of the tracks; and the darker but emphatically less substantial future hinted at by Caan and his thugs. Their future is echoed most strongly in the amoral exploitation flicks of the seventies, from A Clockwork Orange to The Hills Have Eyes, but there are pointers as far away as the dystopian sci-fi and torture porn of today, let alone more nuanced thrillers like The Strangers. It’s hard not to see the Manson family murders of 1969 in this picture, made five years earlier, as if Luther Davis was foretelling the future. Perhaps he was looking at the present too, phrasing his world through the eyes of Kitty Genovese, who famously died three months before this film was released.

There are points where this is underlined in bold ink. Randall eventually engages in dialogue with Cornelia, after she hurls polite abuse at him. ‘What sort of creatures are you?’ she asks, because she cannot understand their motivation. He burps at her and the radio cries, ‘Here, before us, stands the man of tomorrow!’ Talk about a pessimistic social commentary! When Cornelia describes herself as ‘a human being! I’m a thinking, feeling machine!’ it merely prompts Randall to refer to her throughout as ‘the human being’, usage that suggests that he doesn’t see himself as one. He’s an animal, instead, he thinks, a thought backed up by their lack of background, substance or thought. They’re not the iconic juvenile delinquents that Brando or Dean played, they’re just thugs, inept and inane. Yet, time and again, they’re seen as the future. When Cornelia tries to stab Randall with makeshift knives, they bend and he looks at her as if stunned at her lack of acknowledgement that he’s the future and it’s impossible for her to stop him.

The ending is brutal, but again looking both backwards and forwards at once. I don’t want to spoil it so will attempt to be notably vague here, but there’s explicit violence that feels out of place in black and white and there’s a nod as far back as the star-making performance of Lon Chaney in The Miracle Man, made when Olivia de Havilland, one of the last links we still have to that era, was three years old. I’ve met Chaney’s great-grandson, who didn’t know him but runs a company dedicated to his and his son’s work. Yet Olivia de Havilland, alive and vibrant today and celebrating her centennial by talking with People magazine about her career, was alive way back in 1919 when Chaney changed the face of American film. She’s not the only famous star to reach a centennial this year, as Kirk Douglas is set to join her in December, but, while his career ran for longer, it didn’t begin until almost a decade later. I’m happy that we still have both of them but I’m happier still that they had such interesting careers.

Many are also happy that de Havilland took a stand, way back in 1943, against the Hollywood studio system, that resonates today. Having been Oscar nominated as Best Actress for Hold Back the Dawn in 1941, two years after a Best Supporting Actress nod for Gone with the Wind, she asked her employer, Warner Bros, to give her more substantial roles. Their response was to suspend her for six months and, once her contract was up, they suggested that she still owed them six months, as the suspension didn’t count. At this point, industry lawyers stopped the clock whenever an actor wasn’t working, thereby extending seven year contracts into much longer periods of time. De Havilland sued Warner Bros and, in 1944, she won, not merely escaping her own contract, signed back in 1936, but defining California Labor Code Section 2855 to mean seven calendar years. Well into the 21st century, Jared Leto of Thirty Seconds of Mars visited de Havilland in Paris to thank her for the De Havilland Law, as important a legacy as her films.

Deathtrap (1982)

Director: Sidney Lumet
Writer: Jay Presson Allen, from the play by Ira Levin
Stars: Michael Caine, Christopher Reeve and Dyan Cannon

Somehow I hadn’t seen Deathtrap before, even though it was a successful movie in 1982, both critically and commercially, though a host of critics noted similarities to Sleuth, which the lead actor, Michael Caine, had made a decade earlier. Before it was a movie, it was a play, written by Ira Levin and produced on Broadway, where it was nominated for a Tony award and racked up a record run, its 1,793 performances the longest for a comedy thriller. Marian Seldes, who plays the female lead, Myra Bruhl, appeared in every one of those performances, earning herself an appearance in the Guinness Book of World Records as ‘most durable actress’. She wasn’t cast in the film, however, her part going instead to Dyan Cannon, perhaps not a good choice given that she was Razzie-nominated for her trouble, but at least that speaks to the prominence of the film, given that the Golden Raspberries don’t tend to notice small picture. Mad magazine even parodied the movie as Deathcrap, which is a mark of success in its own way.

It’s an intricate piece, which can’t lose its origins on the stage. Almost the entire movie takes place at Sidney Bruhl’s home on Long Island, which is a delightfully open plan affair inside a converted windmill. Such a memorable location, right down to the intricate mechanisms in the roof above the bedroom, is perhaps the most important component that the film can provide but the play can’t. However, it’s a stretch to imagine anyone watching the movie not envisaging the action unfolding on a stage, especially given that Andrzej Bartkowiak shoots much of it from a distance, as if rendering us a theatre audience. It’s ridiculously simple to give spoilers when reviewing this, so I’ll be careful and merely highlight that it’s about both a playwright and a play, also called Deathtrap, while referencing previous plays from the pen of Bruhl, both through dialogue and through use of props from their productions, which adorn the walls of Bruhl’s gorgeous study. The script feeds upon itself vociferously to make all those twists possible.

We even start on Broadway, where Bruhl’s latest play, Murder Most Fair, is failing horribly on its opening night. ‘The worst play I’ve ever seen,’ whispers an audience member, too far away from the back of the theatre for Bruhl to hear. He realises that it’s flopped, metaphorically hearing the critics sharpening their hatchets. ‘So much for truth in advertising,’ comments one. Whodunit? Sidney Bruhl dunit. And in public too. And so he heads home by train, pissed as a newt, to shout at his drama queen wife in a performance that feels like it could be on stage too. He’s had four bums, he says, all of which stink. He’s written out. He’s descended far from the glory days of The Murder Game, the longest running thriller on Broadway. And what’s worst of all is that he has a copy of a stunning play in his hands; it just isn’t his. It was sent to him by a student, Clifford Anderson, who attended a seminar he gave a year earlier. It’s so great that, ‘Even a gifted director couldn’t hurt it,’ he suggests in one of many wonderful lines dotted throughout the script.

Those of you with twisted minds will already be imagining where the plot will take us next and, sure enough, Bruhl runs through a host of options. He promptly fantasises about killing Anderson with the mace which was used in Rigorous Child or attempting to get the play produced under his own name. It’s flippant at first, of course, but then he starts to seriously think about the ramifications. Would he literally kill for another hit play? If we weren’t thinking that already, his wife Myra asks it of him aloud. And yes, he just might! After all, this appears to be the only copy in existence, Anderson having sent his ‘first born child’ to its ‘spiritual father’. He has no family and he’s currently house-sitting for folk travelling abroad. Who would miss him? Who would connect him to Bruhl? This is a dream scene, because it’s literally the job of a mystery writer to figure out how to kill people without anyone finding out. In fact, they do it more often than actual killers, because they never have to worry about being caught. Well, until now.

Sidney Bruhl was played by Shakespearean actor John Wood in the original play, eventually handing the part on to actors as varied as Stacy Keach and Farley Granger. The film role, however, went to Michael Caine, perhaps as an opportunity to progress from the supporting role he played in Sleuth to the lead, as indeed he did in the remake of that film in 2007. He’s well cast, easily able to shift between shouty scenes and calm ones at the drop of a hat, and he sells the multiple levels of the script well. His co-star was a major name in 1982, having been launched to fame as the title character in Superman, a role which he’d reprised in his previous film. Yes, Christopher Reeve plays Clifford Anderson and he’s decent too, if a little more stagy than Caine, underplaying deliberately: young, enthusiastic and very naïve. With Somewhere in Time, Deathtrap and Monsignor, the other three movies that he made in and amongst the first three Superman pictures, Reeve was clearly aiming to diversify his roles and avoid being typecast as a superhero.

I’m far less sold on the performance of Dyan Cannon though, but a debate raged in my head throughout the picture about whether that was a fair judgement or not. Sure, Myra is a histrionic drama queen of a wife who screams like a ditzy blonde waste of space, but then she is, right? Sidney often talks to her like she’s a child, with patience and small words because she’s clearly not on the same intellectual level and she’s her own worst enemy, as highlighted by the pills, cigarettes and lack of any defining purpose. Yes, she’s frickin’ annoying but she’s supposed to be, right? Was she nominated for a Razzie because she was so annoying as Myra or because Myra was so annoying and she played the part precisely right? I couldn’t choose which side I’d take in that debate but ended up noting that the fact that I was debating during the film instead of being caught up in the story’s flow, which might well be an answer all in itself. Of course, is that bad acting from Cannon or bad writing from Levin or screenwriter Jay Presson Allen?

Now, how far can I go without providing spoilers? I should certainly point out that Bruhl invites Anderson to stay with them, with the view of revising his play into something that can be produced. He’s hardly going to own up that it’s perfect already! I ought to highlight the cleverly written scene in which Myra tries to talk her husband out of murdering their guest, while he’s in the room, without letting him in on the fact that it’s even being considered as an idea. That leads to a gloriously tense follow-up where Bruhl traps Anderson in a pair of Houdini’s handcuffs, then proceeds to joke about killing him with his mace. Perhaps I can get away with pointing out that he strangles him to death with a chain instead, given that it happens only a third of the way into the movie, or in stage talk, at the end of the second scene of act one. Reeve was credited above Cannon and had only just showed up, so clearly the script has more for him to do than simply appear and die. That would be overdoing the billing even for Superman!

But I can’t really go any further, except to introduce the fourth major character, Helga ten Dorp, especially given that she’s played by Irene Worth, the reason why I’m watching this movie as she would have been a hundred years old today, 23rd June. Helga is an awesome opportunity for an actress, given that she’s foreign, characterful and the personification of the unexpected. If the film is about Sidney Bruhl and his cleverly constructed murder plan, then Helga ten Dorp is the wild card that he simply couldn’t predict. We’re first introduced to her through conversation between Sidney and Myra; she’s some sort of psychic who assists the police in solving murders in her native Holland and she’s taken a local cottage for six months, which in this sparsely populated part of Long Island means that she’s their temporary neighbour. However, she shows up in person, right after the murder, walking right in and traipsing around feeling pain in the air. She dominates immediately, acting circles around Cannon and Caine lets her run with it.

Worth is remembered far more for her stage work than anything that she did on film, but that’s only a mark of how important she was off screen. She won three Tony awards over the span of a quarter of a century: winning Best Actress for Tiny Alice in 1965 and Sweet Bird of Youth in 1976, then adding Best Featured Actress in 1991 for Lost in Yonkers, a role she reprised two years later when it was adapted to the big screen. Working in a world where critics are notorious for cruelty, Walter Kerr wrote in the New York Times after seeing her play Hedda Gabler that, ‘Miss Worth is just possibly the best actress in the world.’ She made few films, only sixteen over half a century, but they included many notable roles as foreigners, including a seamstress in the French Resistance in Orders to Kill, which which won her a BAFTA. She also played French opposite Alec Guinness in The Scapegoat, but British in Seven Seas to Calais (playing Queen Elizabeth I, no less), German in Forbidden and Russian in both Nicholas and Alexandra and Onegin.

Here, she’s Dutch and she comes very close to stealing the show, even though she doesn’t really have a vast percentage of screen time. Part of it is certainly that Helga is a gift of a part to any talented actress, but the greater part is that she’s the talented actress who brings her to life. As the script unfolds and the paradigm shifting twists proliferate, we never forget that Helga isn’t far away and could easily show up at any moment to throw a psychic spanner into the works. Surely I wasn’t the only one watching not just to grin at the intricate genius of Sidney Bruhl’s plans but to find the one thread that would unravel the whole thing? That old line from Robert Burns floated invisible in the air around him, that the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. And there was never any doubt in my mind that it would be Helga who found that one thread and yanked it out from under him, all the more for her continued conspicuous absence through much of the film.

I’m happy to have finally caught up with Deathtrap, especially having watched Sleuth so recently. I grew up in the eighties and I’m well aware that nostalgia currently sees them as the most embarrassing decade culture ever birthed, just as the sixties were when I was a kid and the seventies were to my younger friends. However, every decade is embarrassing when you choose to see nothing else and this is a great and timely reminder that the eighties produced much of substance, even if most of it is currently obscured by the fashionably awful. It’s always fascinating to watch Michael Caine, who has reinvented himself decade on decade. It was fun to watch a young Christopher Reeve, if not much fun to watch a histrionic Dyan Cannon. It was fascinating to find a masterpiece of writing twists upon twists written while M Night Shyamalan was still in short pants, especially one that’s literate and self-effacing. And it was great to discover another great performance from Irene Worth on what would have been her hundredth birthday!

The Spiral Staircase (1945)

Director: Robert Siodmak
Writers: Mel Dinelli, from the novel, Some Must Watch, by Ethel Lina White
Stars: Dorothy McGuire, George Brent and Ethel Barrymore

Index: 2016 Centennials.

Ethel Lina White isn’t a name that resonates today, even for aficionados of the crime fiction which she wrote, let alone fans of film who experienced her work only through adaptation to the big screen. However, she was a Welsh novelist who was very successful in her day back in the thirties. She wrote seventeen novels, most of which fell into the crime genre; three of them were adapted into major motion pictures, though all were retitled for the screen. We may well be excused for not recognising novels like 1933’s Some Must Watch, 1936’s The Wheel Spins and 1942’s Midnight House, also released in the US as Her Heart in Her Throat. However, film fans ought to recognise what they became: The Spiral Staircase, filmed a number of times but first by Robert Siodmak in 1945; The Lady Vanishes, whose many adaptations include an oustanding one by Alfred Hitchcock in 1938; and 1945’s The Unseen, a thematic sequel to Paramount’s hit of the previous year, The Uninvited. All are well worth seeing.

I’m reviewing that original version of The Spiral Staircase, the most recent of those three films but the earliest of the source novels, as Dorothy McGuire would have been a hundred today, 14th June. She had a highly successful career, nominated for an Academy Award for Gentleman’s Agreement and worthy in films as varied as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Old Yeller and Three Coins in the Fountain. She even played the Virgin Mary in The Greatest Story Ever Told, but I chose this personal favourite to celebrate her career because she gets to lead a fantastic cast, above Elsa Lanchester and an Oscar-nominated Ethel Barrymore, all while portraying a character stricken mute because of childhood trauma. It’s a fantastic opportunity and she gives a strong performance without the benefit of dialogue that reaches superb on occasion and never fails to depict her as a delightful young lady, an appropriate target for a killer who has it in for girls with disabilities or afflictions. Because she has no voice, he literally sees her with no mouth.

The Lost World (1960)

Director: Irwin Allen
Writers: Charles Bennett and Irwin Allen, from the novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Stars: Michael Rennie, Jill St John, David Hedison, Claude Rains and Fernando Lamas

Index: 2016 Centennials.

Irwin Allen, who would have been a hundred years old today, is a rare example of someone who is still remembered by two utterly different audiences. Anyone who grew up watching movies in the seventies knows him as the ‘Master of Disaster’, the man behind the biggest of the disaster movies like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, not to mention lesser films with less catchy titles that followed in their wake, like Flood!, Cave-In! and The Night the Bridge Fell Down. However, audiences a decade older are more likely to remember him for sci-fi shows he produced for television like Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants, many of which I saw on British TV in later re-runs. The source of both of these aspects of his career, though, is really Victorian adventure fiction, as highlighted by the trio of films he directed between 1960 and 1962, his first serious efforts in the director’s chair after a few movies he created mostly out of stock footage with a few new scenes shot with major stars late in their careers.

I’ll mention these films in reverse order. Last up, in 1962, was Five Weeks in a Balloon, which was based on the novel by Jules Verne, a cornerstone of Victorian adventure. Before that, in 1961, was Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, an original story but one which could easily be mistaken for a Verne adaptation, given what it does and where it goes. It’s notable that the Seaview, a nuclear submarine at the heart of the story, was based on the real USS Nautilus, in turn named for the fictional Nautilus of Jules Verne. Kicking off the thematic trio was this picture, The Lost World, adapted in 1960 from a novel by another pivotal author in the Victorian adventure genre, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. I should emphasise that not all connections are valid. The real bottom of the sea is the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, named for HMS Challenger, the survey ship that recorded its depth, but it was no nod to Doyle’s legendary explorer, Professor Challenger, introduced in The Lost World, as the ship came forty years earlier.

The Ghost Breakers (1940)

Director: George Marshall
Writer: Walter DeLeon, based on the play The Ghost Breaker by Paul Dickey and Charles W Goddard
Stars: Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard

This well regarded horror comedy from Paramount has a stunning cast, but most of them weren’t quite so well known at the time. It’s arguable that the leading lady was better known in 1940 than her leading man, though there’s no question that he eclipsed her soon enough. She’s Paulette Goddard, a former Ziegfeld girl who became famous in 1936 when Charlie Chaplin cast her in Modern Times. He married her the same year and they were still married, albeit separated, when she shot this film. Her leading man is Bob Hope, the winner of a prize a quarter of a century earlier for impersonating Chaplin, when Goddard was only five years old; then again, Hope was only twelve. They starred together in The Cat and the Canary in 1939 and followed up the double act here, but were about to be more famous apart: Goddard with The Great Dictator and So Proudly We Hail!, landing her an Oscar nomination, and Hope with the Road movies with Bing Crosby. He hadn’t even hosted the Academy Awards at this point, his first stint imminent in 1941.

In support are names as prominent as Paul Lukas and Anthony Quinn, two actors at opposite ends of their careers. Lukas was most of the way through his, having started out in the teens, though his biggest films were still to come: an Oscar-winning performance in Watch on the Rhine in 1943 and a memorable role as Prof Arronax in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in 1954. Quinn was only five years into his and wouldn’t find his way into a really good lead until Viva Zapata! in 1952. He does get two roles here, but neither is much of an opportunity. And then there’s Willie Best, who would have been a hundred years old today. I don’t know if Hope really called him one of the finest talents he ever worked with, but he was certainly an accomplished performer stuck in an era when coloured actors were rarely given anything of substance to do. Best’s first six credits called him Sleep ‘n’ Eat, mirroring the screen image his studio built for him of an actor who only wanted ‘three square meals a day and a warm place to sleep.’

I chose this film to celebrate his career because it highlights his talents much better than most of the roles he was given, as well as showcasing the inherent racism of the time. Nobody thought it was inappropriate in 1940 for Bob Hope to tell him, ‘You look like a blackout in a blackout.’ Nobody felt bad in 1940 when he describes him with, ‘He always sees the darker side of everything; he was born during an eclipse.’ Nobody had second thoughts about giving him a whole conversation about spooks. Yes, both meanings of the word. Today, each of these instances is cringeworthy, but it’s notable that Best, while he’s still playing a subservient role, gets a part of substance here and at points even dominates scenes, with Hope relegated to being his straight man rather than the other way around. Sure, he’s yet another character with big eyes, sleepy voice and malformed vocabulary, not to mention the inevitable streak of cowardice, but he gets to figure things out that Hope’s heroic lead can’t because at least he’s not stupid.

He’s Alex and he works for Larry Lawrence, a radio personality who’s a sort of gossip columnist for organised crime: ‘the man who knows all the rackets and all the racketeers.’ That’s Hope, of course, and it’s one of his reports that gets him summoned to Frenchy Duval’s hotel room. When he believes he shoots a man dead in the hallway, he finds his way into the room of Mary Carter and the other half of the story. She’s inherited Castillo Maldito, a castle off the coast of Cuba, and she’s just signed the paperwork before a cruise to Havana to take it on. However, there’s a lot of pressure on her to not do so, much of which trawls old dark house clichés: the film begins with a terrific storm, during which she’s warned that no human being has survived a night in the castle, due to the ghosts who want vengeance for the treatment they got from her great-great-grandfather, a notorious slave trader. Parada brings her an anonymous offer of $50,000 for the castle. A stranger promptly rings her to suggest she say no. Strange things are afoot!

I remembered The Ghost Breakers positively, but rewatching highlights how creaky it is. The acting is decent, which isn’t surprising given the cast, and the cinematography is strong, emulating the Universal horror classics from the preceding decade. There’s one scene late in the movie where a zombie stalks Mary within Castillo Maldito and it’s wonderfully handled. Another character trying to climb out of a glass coffin is another spooky highlight. This is no horror movie though, it’s firmly a comedy first and an old dark house mystery second. The horror aspects, done in what would soon become known as the Val Lewton style, are a notable bonus! We’re here half to figure out why someone doesn’t want Mary to take ownership of her inheritance and half to laugh at the light banter of Hope, whether in partnership with Goddard, Best or anyone else. After he broadcasts his latest show, his secretary tells him, ‘You were wonderful, if you’re any judge.’ There are many clever lines of dialogue here and most aren’t racist at all.

The script was written by Walter DeLeon, adapted from the 1909 play, The Ghost Breaker by Paul Dickey and Charles W Goddard. It had been filmed twice before, firstly by Cecil B DeMille in 1914 with H B Warner and Rita Stanwood, and then in 1922 by Alfred E Green with Wallace Reid and Lila Lee. Both films, named for the play (so singular rather than plural), are lost today, leaving this version as the earliest extant. It was oddly remade as a musical in 1953 by this film’s director, George Marshall, as a Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis vehicle called Scared Stiff. That’s best known today as Carmen Miranda’s final film, regarded as inferior to this in every other regard. It’s hard to see why Paramount felt it appropriate to remake it in the fifties as the haunted house setting was already passé and only the mix of horror and comedy, especially coming hot on the heels of The Cat and the Canary, gave it a fresh edge. By the fifties, the formula was firmly in the hands of Abbott and Costello, who had already done it to death, as it were.

Mostly it’s content to run along at a decent pace, with snappy lines arriving fast enough to keep us laughing and spooky scenes to keep us on our toes. Bosley Crowther, writing in The New York Times, praised its ability to make ‘an audience shriek with laughter and fright’ simultaneously. A great example of this shows up almost immediately. The power is out at Mary Carter’s hotel, caused by the storm raging outside. ‘Nice night for a murder,’ she tells a neighbour, as he lights a cigarette on candles brought up for her. He’s taken sharply aback as he’s with the mob. ‘How do you know?’ he replies. Especially so early in the film, this delivers a laugh and a thrill all at once. The same goes for the various reactions to the storm itself. Mary revels in it, throwing her window open to the elements and crying, ‘Exciting, isn’t it?’ Larry, somewhere else in town, merely quips, ‘Basil Rathbone must be giving a party!’ He’s the comedian here, throwing out 1940 pop culture references with abandon, except when he forgets and Alex takes over.

Whenever The Ghost Breakers has legs, it’s worth seeing. Sure, some of the laughs have dated as much as the racism, but it’s funny enough throughout and it often reaches laugh out loud stature. There are down points though, where the script seems distracted from its proclaimed intentions and we wonder what we’re actually watching. These slower scenes, such as many of those on the cruise to Cuba, could easily have been cut and probably should have been; this would have made a much better 75 minute movie than it is an 85 minute one. Then again, we wonder if some scenes were already cut. I wondered why Lloyd Corrigan was even in the movie; he shows up on three distinct occasions, bumping into Mary and clearly setting up some sort of angle that never gets addressed. Was he really just there to distract Anthony Quinn’s second character away? That seems like a real stretch. I expected much more at the Castillo Maldito too, but we take too long to get there and don’t spend enough time there once we do.

Somewhat surprisingly, given that this is a throwback to another time at just over three quarters of a century old, I wondered at how forward looking it actually was. How many horror comedies do we see nowadays, with plots that combine laughs and scares over a grounding of special effects that are rarely as capable as they want to be and some gratuitous exposure of female flesh? We get all that here. The effects vary considerably, from the highly effective local zombie to the poor double exposure of a ghost who climbs out of a chest and walks around, only for us to ponder as to why the chest is transparent rather than the ghost. As to female flesh, Mary realises that Larry and Alex have rowed over to her island, so she swims over to join them. While she does cover up an enticing bathing suit with a robe, it’s promptly ripped half open by a stubborn banister as she tries to escape the pursuing zombie. It’s easy to see what drew Chaplin to her: Paulette Goddard had a very nice pair of legs indeed!

And so to posterity. At the time this was a Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard picture, in many ways an otherwise unrelated sequel to the previous year’s The Cat and the Canary. Today, it’s not hard to see that they don’t get the strongest characters in the story. Larry Lawrence (‘My middle name is Lawrence too; my parents had no imagination.’) starts well but fades away once we get to Cuba. The generation of today, who didn’t grow up watching Bob Hope host the Academy Awards ceremony (19 times, just in case you didn’t keep count) or have a clue what a USO tour is, may not realise that he’s even the lead. Some might see him as the romantic interest for Paulette Goddard. Others might consider that he’s the other half of a double act with Willie Best. Many, especially once we land on Mary’s island, will find this so reminiscent of a live action Scooby Doo cartoon that they’ll translate the characters into the ones they know and love; I wonder how many will see Hope as Fred and how many Shaggy or Scooby as Best is as often each of them.

And that’s much of why I chose The Ghost Breakers to celebrate Best’s career on what would have been his hundredth birthday. The thirties and forties, not to mention the following string of decades too, were really not good for actors of colour. There were many of them and their talents were often substantial. Nobody is going to talk down Paul Robeson or Hattie McDaniel, but even given as many wide-eyed maids that the latter found herself stuck playing, she was regarded better than Stepin Fetchit, Mantan Moreland and Willie Best, to name just a trio of talented actors given consistently stereotypical roles that became more and more culturally embarrassing as years passed. Eventually, they were decried by the civil rights movement for enforcing stereotypes, even though opportunities were nonexistent. In 1934, while Best was shooting The Nitwits, he told an interviewer, ‘What’s an actor going to do? Either you do it or get out.’ He did it, making 119 movies in just over two decades. This may well be his finest role.

Postal Inspector (1936)

Director: Otto Brower
Writer: Horace McCoy, from a story by Robert Presnell and Horace McCoy
Stars: Ricardo Cortez, Patricia Ellis, Michael Loring and Bela Lugosi

I’ve tried to select ‘interesting’ films for this project, but they really don’t come any more interesting than this. It’s a 1936 picture from Universal that runs a mere 58 minutes but still manages to cram more in than most TV shows manage in an entire season. It starts out as a drama, turns into a musical, then becomes a mystery. It’s a romance, of course, a thriller and, eventually, a disaster movie. More than anything, it’s a real slice of history. Yes, we had postal inspectors; in fact, we still do. They’re USPIS, the United States Postal Inspection Service, and they’re not just the oldest law enforcement agency in the country, they even predate it! Back in 1772, Benjamin Franklin, the colonial Postmaster General, appointed a surveyor to regulate and audit the mail. The service has changed over time, dealing with mail fraud, terrorism (remember media companies being sent anthrax?) and the transportation of contraband; the Comstock Law of 1873 barred the sending of erotica, contraceptives and even sex education material.

Of course, they’re also tasked with protecting the mail and the people who transport it, which is what comes into play here, when it’s threatened by both thieves and a natural disaster. The value it provides is personified in the form of Ricardo Cortez, who plays USPIS Inspector Bill Davis who, as the film begins, is one of a number of inspectors the US President is thanking over the radio for their work in moving gold reserves to inland cities. Yes, this does play out like USPIS propaganda and Davis is a saintly action role for Cortez, who was a matinee idol in the twenties, the last actor to be billed above Greta Garbo (for Torrent in 1926); a leading man in the thirties (his most important role was probably playing Sam Spade in the original version of The Maltese Falcon in 1931); but a fading name in the forties (playing support in Romance of the Rio Grande and I Killed that Man). He retired after Bunco Squad in 1950, but returned to the screen once more, for the aptly named The Last Hurrah eight years later, before becoming a stockbroker.

1936 was around the time that he was still top billed but starting to fall out of fashion. He demonstrates here, however, that he was up to any challenge that the studio could throw at him; for some reason, they rarely chose to do so. A running time of less than an hour means that the story unfolds quickly and, as soon as the President finishes talking, he’s off to Millstown on a plane that’s out of a different age. It’s not just that it’s tiny with only a single seat either side of the aisle, it’s that Davis can wander into the cabin to chat with the pilot, there’s a no smoking sign that clicks on with the bad weather and, because it’s unnerving the passengers, he persuades the young lady on the other side of the aisle to sing something as ludicrous as Let’s Have Bluebirds on All Our Wallpaper to avert panic, accompanied by little Billy on the harmonica. She’s Connie Larrimore, a nightclub singer returning to her home town to sing at the Golden Eagle. She’s played by Patricia Ellis, who would have been one hundred years old today.

In many ways, she’s the lead in a story that unfolds next to Cortez’s and continues to cross over into it, not least because Bill’s little brother Charlie went to school with her and had a big crush on her that never went away. That’s understandable, as she’s both the girl next door and the next big star; and I’m talking there about both Connie Larrimore and Patricia Ellis. Sadly though, stardom is an elusive creature and it continually danced around her during a busy decade that saw her appear in 44 films in only eight years. A WAMPAS baby star, she started in pictures at sixteen and worked her way up from uncredited secretaries to leading ladies, just in second tier pictures that led her to call herself ‘the Queen of B-movies at Warner Brothers’. I knew her best from The Case of the Lucky Legs, in which Ellis played the lucky legs and Warren William played Perry Mason (Cortez would inherit that role in his very next film, The Case of the Black Cat), but she didn’t have that much to do there. She’s much busier here and she clearly enjoyed it.

In case we think this picture is about her, we shift quickly back to Cortez to explain why we should care about a postal inspector, a job so unlikely for action hero that we expect it to go to Steven Seagal. But no, they do serious work! Mr. Ritter was scammed by a conman who put his life savings into gold mine stock; Davis can’t help until he points out that he paid that money by cheque, sent by registered mail and he has the receipt. Others have been ripped off too, ordering unlikely gadgets from advertisements: nose-straightening devices, hair-growing machines, vision improving drumsticks. ‘There’s one born every minute,’ Davis tells Charlie, but he adds a major caveat. ‘When the crooks use the mails,’ he says, ‘they make Uncle Sam a party to their transactions’ and that means that he can get involved. ‘You know there’s something pretty comforting about the thought that, with no more insurance than a mere postage stamp, a man may entrust his life savings or his most personal secrets into the hands of absolute strangers.’

In case we think this picture is about him, we shift quickly back to Ellis because there are a number of angles going on. One is the fact that she’s the singer in this show and she gets a couple more chances to prove it: one in the shower, with the fantastic Hattie McDaniel joining in as her maid, Debbie; and another up on stage at the Golden Eagle. It’s obvious that there’s a story developing here, because the nightclub owner, Gregory Benez, is played by a suave Bela Lugosi, because we soon discover that he’s heavily in debt and because Insp. Davis emphatically dislikes him. Another is the fact that Charlie is clearly falling for Connie and she could well be falling for him right back. A third to tie these together is the revelation that Charlie collects old banknotes and works with them at the Federal Reserve. In fact, he’s about to escort three million bucks worth to his brother at the Post Office to ship back to Washington, DC. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to connect those dots.

In case we think this picture is about her, we shift quickly back to Cortez. You see what I mean about intersecting storylines in an hour long movie? One minute it’s all about Connie the romantic lead, the next it’s all about Bill the dedicated postal inspector. And that angle is about to get particularly topical. Lt. Ordway shows up demanding that Davis open a letter that’s proving important in a murder case, only to find him refuse. Only the recipient can open it, he insists, bringing to mind the recent affair in which Apple refused the FBI about breaking encryption on a terrorist’s phone or the current one in which a Florida court reversed a finding to say that an alleged pervert must provide the passcode to unlock his iPhone. Of course, he distracts neatly from this moral issue by handing Ordway the file the Post Office has built on a clever insurance fraud ring so that he can take the credit. If only it was that easy to figure out a complex point of law! And anyway, it’s about time this became a disaster movie.

Are you keeping up? Mystery, romance, drama, thriller, musical... We can add comedy to that, given that someone just dropped a pair of guinea pigs off at the Post Office, even though they refused to send them through the mail. What will they feed them? One employee retrieves a bottle of pills from the Medical Frauds cabinet. ‘It’s the scientist in me,’ he laughs. We can also add gangster flick because, shock horror, the mail truck carrying those three million in old notes promptly gets robbed, using a car stolen from one of our leads. And now, we start the disaster movie, with stock footage floods overwhelming the state; Yarborough Post Office is underwater and Davis flies up to help out. ‘We’ll keep the Post Office open, flood or no flood,’ he tells the local postmaster, but, by the time he gets back, Millstown is flooding too and he’s really up against it. Which way will he turn? Watch the next thrilling episode of Postal Inspector to find out! Well no, this is a feature but it did often feel like it was condensed from a 12 part serial.

What’s most impressive is that screenwriter Horace McCoy, working from a story he wrote with Robert Presnell, stays focused on the little details. Remember Mr. Ritter, who lost his money to a gold mine scam? He gets a second scene in which he provides new information critical to the plot and gets an opportunity to develop his character, even though he has less than a minute of screen time in the entire movie. That’s impressive and it helps us to realise that this movie isn’t just about Postal Inspector Bill Davis and night club singer Connie Larrimore, it’s about a whole bunch of characters who have their own stories unfolding alongside theirs. Novelists talk about being able to imagine the story from the perspective of every character in their books. I don’t often get to see that on screen and never in an hour long B-movie. Suddenly, it’s not surprising to find that McCoy was actually a novelist. He had just published They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? in 1935, even though it wasn’t filmed until 1969. Other novels followed.

And that’s why this feels so schizophrenic. Cortez is the star of one of those odd propaganda pictures that Hollywood made back in the thirties about federal law enforcement officers; the same year saw Grand National release Great Guy, which had Jimmy Cagney battle corruption as an investigator for the Bureau of Weights and Measures! Yet Ellis is the lead in a romantic musical, while her love interest, Charlie, played by Michael Loring, is both the hero and the sidekick in a gangster movie and Bela Lugosi is his villain. Lesser characters like Mr. Ritter and Lt. Ordway have their own human interest stories and even the guinea pigs get their subplot wrapped up by the end. That’s not to say that any of these stories are particularly deep, because the sheer balls of McCoy to cram all of them into a sub-sixty minute movie means that none of them are, but they certainly keep us on the hop! There’s even time for odd little historical comment, such as when KWZZ radio cancels their programming to allow people to send personal messages.

I’ve lost count of how many Bela Lugosi movies I’ve seen and I’ve watched a bunch starring Ricardo Cortez too, but this is a riot I’m happy to have discovered because of Patricia Ellis. She was never the greatest actor in the world, coming off here like a Myrna Loy stand-in, but she’s enjoyable to watch and even to listen to and it’s sad that she couldn’t find her way up the ladder to act in better and better distributed material. The biggest film she made was 42nd Street, but she was just an uncredited secretary. However, she did get to play Jimmy Cagney’s love interest in both Picture Snatcher and The St. Louis Kid; an underage target for Adolph Menjou to seduce in the notorious Convention City; and backup for Laurel & Hardy in the Oscar-nominated Block-Heads. She was even top-billed in Down the Stretch, above Mickey Rooney, and Hold ’Em Yale, above both Cesar Romero and Buster Crabbe. She retired in 1939 to be a wife and mother, but did leave behind a sizeable if brief filmography, ‘the Queen of B-movies at Warner Brothers’ indeed.