Recent Reviews
The Cagneys
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
Something to Sing About (1937)
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
A Lion Is In the Streets (1953)
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
Never Steal Anything Small (1959)
Shake Hands With the Devil (1959)
Thursday September 29, 2022
Movie Review: Blow Out (1981)
WARNING: SPOILERS
Apparently this is one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorite movies. Back in the day, it was one of three movies he’d show women to see if it might work out between them.
Quentin: It never would’ve worked out between us.
Twoish?
I’ve watched “Blow Out” three or four times now, but my opinion is the same as when I saw it in theaters in 1981. It’s got beautiful shots, great atmosphere, a star turn from John Travolta, and a political thriller plot that mixes elements of the JFK assassination and Chappaquiddick into a storyline that’s basically “Blow Up” for sound engineers. It should work.
But it’s just too stupid.
We get competence from nobody: cops, newsmen, our hero. Even Burke, the superefficient assassin (John Lithgow), keeps screwing up. Doesn’t he have Sally (Nancy Allen) on the waterfront, with no one around, and suddenly he’s dragging her up the stairs overlooking the Liberty Bell Parade in downtown Philadelphia? Why? For the American flag backdrop? Or to give our hero a chance to regroup, since, like an idiot, he drove his jeep maniacally through the parade, crashed into a window display in slow motion and knocked himself out? For how long—10 minutes? Half hour? Long enough, anyway, for EMTs to extricate him and put him in an ambulance and hook him to an IV. And in that entire time, the assassin, whom we’ve seen kill two girls in seconds takes forever to kill Sally. Oh, and he only killed the first girl because he thought she was Sally—so he screwed up right from the start. Oh no, I’m stuck in a Hitchcockian/De Palmian nightmare-scape full of sexy doppelgangers! Should’ve been his first clue.
The whole movie is framed around incompetence. It begins as a movie-within-a-movie, a low-budget slasher skinflick called “Co-Ed Frenzy” in which our point-of-view is the slasher spying on girls dancing in nighties, masturbating and fucking, until he finally gets to the girl alone in the shower, raises his long hunting knife, and she screams. Kinda. It’s a weak scream. It dribbles out. The sound man, Jack (Travolta), laughs, the producer (Peter Boyden) says we need to fix it, and it becomes this film’s running gag. The producer auditions three girls who don’t cut it. We see two girls pulling each other’s hair trying to dub it. And at the very end what does Jack use? The very thing that haunts him: Sally’s scream as she’s about to be killed by Burke. It’s the oddest of endings: shoehorning horror and tragedy into the running gag. Is it supposed to be funny? Poignant? It just lands sideways. It dribbles out.
It also means that these low-budget filmmakers can’t get a girl to scream right in a slasher flick. WTF? Jack has reels and reels of sounds but none for a scream? Better, after the screw-up is revealed, what is the producer’s directive to Jack? I didn’t like the wind noises you used. Get me more wind noises. Sure thing, Godard. So that’s why Jack is standing outside recording sounds when we get the titular blow out.
Is the incompetence purposeful? A feature rather than a bug? Because it’s everywhere. The highly placed political enemies of Gov. George McRyan, the man poised to be the next president of the United States, decide to catch him in flagrante, so they hire … local scumbag Manny Karp (Dennis Franz)? Then one of their members, Burke, goes rogue with his assassination idea.
We do get one bright, shining moment of competence. A local anchorman, Frank Donahue (Curt May), does some digging and discovers that: 1) Jack thinks McRyan’s tire was shot out, and 2) Jack has a recording of it. Hey, Donahue got all the facts right! And he’s ready to listen to the story Jack has been trying to tell for half the movie! So of course, at this point, Jack pushes Donahue away. And when Jack finally decides to talk to him, it’s now Donahue's turn to be an idjit. This is his actual quote: “Great. Look, can I give you a call this afternoon sometime?” Think about that for two seconds. You’re a reporter tracking down evidence that the next president of the United States was assassinated, and one guy is ready to give it all to you, and your response is: “Twoish?”
But of course it allows Burke to do his Burke thing. Which leads to more incompetence. Burke, pretending to be Donahue, sets up a meeting with Sally (to kill her), Jack doesn’t like the smell of it, so he calls Donahue back to check on the details. Kidding, that makes too much sense. Instead, suspecting Donahue, he puts a wire on Sally so they’ll get the exchange on tape. “This is just like the police incident that turned me into a guilt-ridden hack, but let’s give it another go.” Meanwhile, waiting to kill Sally, Burke passes the time by killing another hooker. I guess he’s establishing a fact-pattern for the cops. Or writer-director Brian De Palma had a few more Hitchockian homages he just had to give us.
And after all of this incompetence, do you know who, besides Jack, is left standing? Dennis Franz. A true testament to our world.
Loose ends
If none of this bothers you, I get why you’d like “Blow Out.” I love the gritty location shots around Philly, Travolta’s Sweathog charisma, Lithgow’s low-key villainy, the split-screens, the beautiful foregrounding profiles (owl, Travolta). But the other stuff bothers me too much. I also don’t dig Nancy Allen’s Sally. Apparently she envisioned her character as a rag doll? It shows.
I’ve long had a problem with movies—like “12 Monkeys”—where, when the male hero is shot down, the story basically ends. Everything the girl knows is about to die if the bad guy gets away, but no, cry at the body of the hero instead. Well, this is the other side of the same coin. Everything is about saving the girl, and when she dies, that’s all, folks. The cops conclude that Sally killed Burke while being strangled from behind by Burke. But is the story over? Donahue, you assume, would still be interested in the story—more so now that Sally has died. Manny Karp lives. And shouldn’t all of them be worried for their lives? Aren’t they all still loose ends?
Instead: “It’s a good scream. A good scream.” The ending that dribbles out.
Tuesday September 27, 2022
Dreaming of Conan O'Brien
I was laying on my stomach on a lounge chair in an area outside of a building where there was a long row of chairs and lounge chairs. A group of us were there, and Conan O'Brien came over, and I sensed this was his territory and I was in his spot. But I didn't budge. Eventually, and not rudely, he told me to get out of his chair. “Really?” I said. “You think this is yours?” I was kind of joking and kind of not—it seemed a dick move on his part but I didn't really care about the chair. The group of us were watching TV, most of us sitting, Conan standing, and as he did so he blocked the sun. “That's why we need a tall person standing there,” I said. “So the sun isn't shining on the TV and we can see it better.” It was supposed to be a joke but Conan got huffy and began to go inside. “Conan...” I began. “Conan...” And just as I was telling him I was joking and he could have his seat, he turned on me angrily and said I was no longer invited to this place. Then he left. That was it, I was banned. The others sort of awkwardly moved away from me, and some part of me shrugged, oh well, but another part thought, well, that's a shame.
This was amid several dreams about the logistics of moving from different rooms/apartments in the last few days of a long trip, with the suitcase nearly empty of clean clothes. One of the rooms was in an old girlfriend's basement, and one of our group, an adult who seemed to know more about the world, was leaving her a tip ($50 or $100, I couldn't tell) paperclipped to a postcard on a small table. “Are we supposed to do that?” I asked. “Of course,” he said. I felt guilty over my breach of etiquette. How did I not know this?
Monday September 26, 2022
Movie Review: The Wagons Roll at Night (1941)
WARNING: SPOILERS
This is Humphrey Bogart’s last movie before “The Maltese Falcon” made him a star, and this is Sylvia Sidney’s last movie before a four-year hiatus from making movies. Bogart was about to break big at age 42 while Sidney was washed up at 31. So it goes.
This attitude is reflected in the film, too, in an exchange between Sidney’s world-weary Madame (Flo) Lorraine, the fortune teller, and Eddie Albert’s wide-eyed grocer-turned lion-tamer Matt Varney:
Flo: Please don’t call me Miss Loraine. It makes me feel kind of old.
Matt: Aw shucks, I bet you’re not much older than I am.
Not much, no. In real life, Eddie Albert was four years older than Sidney. Maybe that’s why Sidney gives him the doubletake.
Little sister
“The Wagons Roll at Night” is a bad, boring movie. Nick Coster (Bogie) runs a traveling circus whose big attraction is Hoffman the Great (Sig Ruman), a lion tamer. Unfortunately, Hoffman is a rummy, and one day a lion gets loose. Local boy Matt Varney keeps it at bay so Bogie hires him for the week. Hoffman gets a little jealous, Flo gets a little sweet on the kid, Nick gets a little idea: Hire him full-time as Hoffman’s assistant, then maybe he can take over. Since Hoffman is such a rummy and all.
As a boss, Nick is cynical but generally OK. Except for this part: Don’t ever talk about his kid sister!
Flo makes that mistake and he tells her to shut up. “She’s not like us,” he says. “We’re a lot of mugs, grifters, and riff-raff.” (“Mugs, Grifters and Riff-Raff” would make a good title for a book on Warner Bros. films.
The conversation gets a little better when he calms down.
Nick: It’s just this sleazy game we’re in.
Flo: If that’s the way you feel about it why don’t you get out of it?
Nick: Yeah, wind up in a bread line. It’s the game I woke up in, the only one I know. But it ain’t for my sister. She’ll be a lady if I have to break her neck.
The way he says “woke up in … only one I know” … just has that classic Bogie cadence. You can imagine Rick or Sam saying it.
You know what would be great? If a movie introduced an aberration like Nick’s with his sister and then completely ignored it for the rest of the film. Alas, not here. If you don’t see where this thing is going, I’d recommend a visit to an ophthalmologist.
Matt wins Hoffman’s job, Hoffman shows up again and starts a fight but gets mauled by Caesar, the most dangerous of the lions, who reaches a big paw out of the cage. (I was rooting for the lions.) Since a local yokel (Garry Owen) blames Matt for all this, Matt has to go into hiding. And since Nick isn’t around, Flo drives him up to Nick’s parents farm, where Mary Coster (Joan Leslie, all of 16), is just back from the convent, and as perky as Folgers. Shock of shocks, she and Matt fall for each other.
That sets up the rest of the movie. Nick tries to keep them apart, they can’t be kept apart, so Nick decides to put Caesar in the cage with Matt. That’s right, he decides to kill Matt rather than let the relationship with his sister play out. Except when sis shows up, pleading, Nick joins him in the cage, gets mauled, Nick drags him out.
Does Bogie die? Of course. He’s still at that stage of his career. He made around 30 movies between “Petrified Forest” and “Maltese Falcon” and he died in probably 95% of them. The only one I know where he didn’t die was “They Drive By Night,” where he just loses an arm.
As his death scenes go, this one is pretty bad. “I was wrong, Mary, about the kid. Guess I was wrong about a lot of things.” And to Flo: “Do me a favor, will ya? See these kids get married … Throw ’em a swell party…”
Caesar endured.
Little Foy
Cast notices: Nick’s mom (and thus Bogie’s mom) is played by Clara Blandick, Auntie Em from “The Wizard of Oz, while Charley Foy, of the Seven Little Foys, is roustabout and comic relief. He has a couple of not-bad line readings.
The director is Ray Enright, who did 72 features between 1927 and 1953, none of them standouts. Only three of his movies have IMDb ratings above 7.0, and they aren’t exactly household names:
- “Skin Deep” (1929), 7.5
- “One Way to Love” (1946), 7.2
- “Dames (1934), 7.1, co-directed with Busby Berkeley.
It’s not like Enright worked in B pictures, either. He got big stars, he just directed them in their least-memorable adventures: Marlene Dietrich in “The Spoilers,” James Cagney in “The St. Louis Kid,” Errol Flynn in “Montana.” Bogart here.
Don’t worry, Humphrey. A better world is just around the corner.
Sunday September 25, 2022
We Blow
I experienced a couple of leaf blowers this weekend—one across from Scarecrow Video yesterday, the other on my usual walk to Lake Washington today—and for some reason this time they just felt like the end of everything to me. We created this device that is super-noisy, fuel inefficient and just generally inefficient, whose purpose is not to clean but to move a mess from one location (yours) to another location (theirs) while bothering as many people as possible. And these things still exist and thrive after decades. They're indicative of what we're like as a species and why we'll end.
Saturday September 24, 2022
No. 700
I'd say touch 'em all, Albert, but I think he knows the routine by now.
Four times in Major League Baseball history someone's hit a 700th homerun—three in my lifetime:
- Babe Ruth, July 13, 1934, vs. Detroit's Tommy Bridges, 3rd inning, one man on
- Henry Aaron, July 21, 1973, vs. Philadelphia's Ken Brett, 3rd inning, one man on
- Barry Bonds, Sept. 17, 2004, vs. San Diego's Jake Peavy, 3rd inning, leadoff
- Albert Pujols, Sept. 23, 2022, vs. Los Angeles' Phil Bickford, 4th inning, two men on
Interesting it's only been two months, and two innings. Everyone was pretty consistent on the inning until Albert showed up. To be fair, he also hit one in the 3rd inning yesterday. He hit two. He's the first guy to hit two homers the day he hit his 700th.
I don't really remember Aaron's, I just remember the pursuit. I wrote about it back then for Kid's Life (5th grade version), which I wrote about here when Aaron died. I believe I was on the east coast when it happened, maybe Rehoboth Beach, Del. That was the summer we spent about two months on the east coast. I might not even have seen the newspaper. We saw the newspapers less when we traveled, though I would've gravitated toward the sports section immediately if I had. But I might've missed that day.
Bonds' pursuit just filled me with dread. It felt inevitable and wrong and I hated every second of it. It felt like a crime. It still does.
As for Uncle Albert? Just a few months ago, for the Opening Day slideshow of active leaders, I wrote: “Albert's No. 1 [in active homers] with 679. Does he have 21 more in him? Last year, split between So Cal teams, he hit 17.” That was all I wrote because I had no idea. If I'd had to put money on it, I would've bet no. But he's had a helluva farewell season back in St. Louis. The Cards are smart. They're using him judiciously, most often against lefties, whom he's crushing: .355/.405/.764. Against righties it's tougher: .209/.297/.384. Bickford, though, is a rightie. No. 699 was off a lefty, Andrew Heaney, who ran into trouble in the 4th. Down 2-0, he got two outs but let two men on (walk, single), and I guess Dodgers' manager Dave Roberts didn't want to risk the matchup with Albert again. Which is smart. But it didn't matter. Boom. Cards take a 5-zip lead, all on Albert's back, and win it 11-0.
Was it too early? It's the wrong question, a spoiled question, but I'll ask it anyway. Not sure where the drama is now. He's fourth all-time in homers (has been for a few weeks since he passed A-Rod at 696) but he's not passing Ruth. Not in homeruns anyway. But RBIs? He's just six behind Ruth, 2208 vs. 2214, for second there, to Aaron, who's out of reach.
700 is a magic number, only slightly tarred by Bonds and Pat Robertson. Enjoy it. We won't see its like again for decades.
Saturday September 24, 2022
Movie Review: She Had to Say Yes (1933)
“I suppose it's just a matter of choosing the lesser evil.”
WARNING: SPOILERS
I’d love to watch this with a group of twentysomethings just to see their heads explode.
First there’s the title, titillating back then, a lawsuit waiting to happen now, and not even true in terms of the story. Loretta Young didn’t have to say yes, and she didn’t say yes. And anyway there’s a better title—which I’ll get to by and by.
Please don’t
In the midst of the Great Depression, a New York clothing company run by Sol Glass (Ferdinand Gottschalk) uses “customer girls” to entertain out-of-town buyers. You’ve got to do what you can to survive, right? The problem is Sol is losing business because his girls are “worn-out gold diggers.”
Let’s pause for a moment over the term “gold digger.” The original meaning was literal, of course, a 49er in the 1840s, say; but in the 1920s it began to mean a woman, usually unmarried, often a chorus girl, who uses her wiles to get men to part with their dough. It was the title of a silent movie in 1923, and became the title of a series of musicals at Warner Bros.: Gold Diggers of 1933, 1935, 1937. Here’s a newspaper.com chart of how often the term shows up in American newspapers from 1910 to 1950:
1933 was the peak year, with 21,201 references.
The problem with Sol’s girls isn't that they’re gold diggers; it’s that they’re bad gold diggers. A rep from “Beau Marche” (nice) is locked out of his hotel room in his underwear. That’s a gold digger? Not from Sol’s perspective, since he loses the dude’s business. Which is the point he makes at an emergency meeting: “Gentlemen, our customers must be entertained but never insulted.”
One manager, after a failed attempt at the high road (getting rid of customer girls altogether), says their girls aren’t just “worn out”; they’re the same. The out-of-town buyers have seen them before. Which is when up-and-comer Tommy Nelson (Regis Toomey) gets an idea: Why not use the girls from the steno pool? They’re new, cute, “and they got brains that work standing up, too.”
And hey, he just happens to be dating one of them: Flo (Loretta Young). And she’s willing to help the team, and big buyer Luther Haines (Hugh Herbert of the high-pitched laugh) certainly has an eye for her, but no, Tommy loves her too much for that. Tommy may seem like a crass jerk but he keeps doing the right thing by her.
Until he doesn’t. Then he’s cheating on her with Birdie (Suzanne Kilborn). And when a big shot, Daniel Drew (Lyle Talbot), comes to town, hey, could Flo show him around?
Talbot’s the leading man, so we assume he’ll be a nicer guy than Tommy. Not really. He puts the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door while plying Flo with booze.
He: You’re a funny little thing. C’mere, will you—
She: Oh, please don’t.
And later:
He: Yours is the penalty for being so lovely.
She: I suppose yours is the privilege for being so important.
And even later:
She: I hate being pawed.
He: Maybe you’ve never been pawed properly.
Reminder: This is the movie’s leading man.
With the help of brassy friend Maizee (Winnie Lightner, the best thing in the film), Flo eventually learns Tommy is cheating on her and breaks up with him. Then Tommy shows up drunk and mashes her: “My money’s as good as theirs! Now you just close your eyes and pretend I’m a buyer.”
Seriously, half the film is Loretta Young politely and/or tearfully fending off the amorous advances of jerks. And when she tells Sol she won’t do the “customer girl” thing anymore, he insists, so she quits. She tells Maizee that she’s quitting men, too. But as soon as Danny “You’ve Never Been Pawed Properly” Drew calls, she’s back in the game.
It’s an awkward game. One moment he’s all over her, the next he’s professing his love. The latter scenes are actually worse. They visit the 86th floor of the newly opened Empire State Building, he says he feels on top of the world, then adds, “With you by my side, I’d get the same feeling in the subway.” Uck. She looks over the edge and says it makes her dizzy, and he looks at her and says the same. Uck.
And then he pimps her out! Kinda sorta. The guy holding up his high-priced merger is Luther Haines of the high-pitched giggle; and even though it makes her eyes dim with sadness, Danny asks her to use her connection to get to Haines. I guess she assumes the worst? Because she winds up using her beauty, and Haines’ lechery, to trick him into the merger. And then Danny assumes the worst—that she slept with Haines? Because he drives her to an out-of-the-way house and tries to rape her.
How long did you think I was going to fall for this wide-eyed stuff? Me with a reputation a mile long. And I fall as though I’d never met a little tramp before.
Reminder: This is the movie’s leading man.
Hey, guess who’s outside the house? Tommy! The other jerk. He’s been following her because he needs to know the age-old idiot-man question—saint or whore?—and for a moment he believes the former again. Then her purse spills, he sees the $1,000 check for the merger deal, and assumes it was for, you know, whoring. Which is when Danny comes to her rescue. He can accuse her of whoring but no one else can!
Of course, silly!
That’s pretty much the movie: Men force women to use their sexual allure to get money from other men, then accuse the women of being tramps.
I was curious how it would end. Would Flo just declare her independence? Could she and Maizee take to the road like an ur-Thelma and Louise? Of course not. Either way, she couldn’t wind up with Danny. Not after all he said and did. They wouldn’t force that on us, would they?
They would. Mel Gibson’s Jesus was less tortured this dialogue:
She: Oh, why doesn’t a woman ever get a break? You treat us like the dirt under your feet—first Tommy, then you, and now Tommy again.
He: I guess I’m just thick, darling. I love ya, I really love ya. If I didn’t I wouldn’t have said those terrible things to you. … Will you forget all this, and forgive me, and marry me? I’m terribly sorry.
She: I suppose it’s just a matter of choosing the lesser evil.
He: Then you’ll marry me?
She: Of course, silly!
That's my suggested title: “The Lesser Evil.” Both of you are jerks, he’s a bigger one, so I guess I’ll live with you forever. Imagine poor Maizee when she hears the news.
The screenwriters (Rian James and Don Mullaly) and directors (George Amy and Busby Berkeley) manage to do one thing right. After the above, Danny says he needs to get his hat and coat, Flo whispers in his ear, and he picks her up and takes her inside. Fade out. We never find out what she says. That’s good—both in a “Lost in Translation” way and because we don't have to hear any more dialogue.
Friday September 23, 2022
Dreaming of a High-Tech Retirement Home ... Or Is it????
I had moved into the new modern highrise where Patricia was living. It may or may not have been a senior living facility—that might have come later—but it was totally teched up. Patricia was able to come and go because of a chip they'd placed inside her, while I still had to sign in at security checkpoints and use a keycard at specific locales that she could just breeze past. There were also helpful roomba-like robots gliding around, being helpful, answering questions.
One night we were returning to her/our place, and there was a key in the door. “Did you leave this in here when you left this afternoon?” I said, annoyed. “I must have,” she said, guiltily. (I know: key, high-tech. Anyway.) The door was unlocked but inside we could hear some voices, and in another room, a spare bedroom, my sister Karen and her husband Eric were setting things up. That's right, they were staying for a week or whatever, and we'd sent them the key. “You know, the key was still in the door,” I said. I was addressing Eric more than Karen, but his reaction was more of a shrug than a mea culpa. I tried to make them understand the import. “Patricia has all her stuff here, you know,” I said. “You can't ... It's just ... It could be dangerous ...” but I was getting nowhere. Blank stares. So I gave up. I thought about going to a neighborhood bar for a drink but remembered I was trying to drink less.
For a high-tech highrise, the place had a lot of byzantine hallways, and I was on the first floor, I guess near the kitchen, and was trying to get up to our room. An elevator door opened and I went inside and one of the roombas followed me in. But it was tiny, and as I turned to punch in our floor I saw there was only one floor you could go to. Like floor 28. I figured it was a service elevator. “Sorry, wrong one,” I said and tried to get off. But the roomba got in my way, and said, “No, this is the right one,” and the doors closed. And the roomba suddenly grew in size and grabbed me and told me all of these things I was going to do. It was in the middle of this list when it realized: “It doesn't have the chip in it.” And that's when I realized I didn't have to do all the stuff it was telling me, I had free will. So I began to punch it and punch it to let me go. It was tough, because it was metal, but I damaged it. Then I tried to figure out how not to go to floor 28. The roomba, damaged, could still be helpful. “Press the down arrow,” it said.
In the hallways again I realized what was going on. The implants allowed them to take control of the residents, who would then sign over their wealth; and then they'd be killed or commit suicide and more rooms would open up. Did it begin as a way of dealing with a growing, aging population? And then it became this money-making enterprise? I was running through the hallways trying to find Patricia, who had a chip in her and was in danger. And now I was in danger. They knew that I didn't have the chip. And that I knew.
I like how cinematic this dream is. That clues are mentioned early—me not having a chip—but in a way that made it seem like “Get with it, Erik,” rather than “This could be dangerous.” The most vivid part was the elevator scene, so cramped, and with the floor buttons, or button, around the left corner of the elevator, where it never is in real life, but where I expected it to be in this dream. I also liked how the movie went from horror (the roomba growing) to a kind of Will Smith action-adventure (me running through the hallways trying to find Patricia). Plus the grand lesson: I thought I was going to have to do all the things the roomba was telling me, but I didn't, because I still had free will.
This was a middle-of-the-night dream—I think I woke up about 2:30, then went back to sleep—but still remembered it later. It didn't fade, as middle-of-the-night dreams often do. Possibly because, in subsequent dreams, I think I was telling people about this one. I think I was dreaming telling people about my dream.
Monday September 19, 2022
What Is Boris Karloff 'Known For'?
No, not for one of the most famous screen incarnations of all time. Of course not. Why would he be?
Some might be mollified by the 1935 sequel up there in first place but not me. And that's knowing what I know. I know Karloff isn't known for “Frankenstein” per IMDb's algorithm because he wasn't the star of it. He was fourth-billed. Colin Clive was the nominal star, and, yes, per IMDb, he's known for Frankenstein. It's No. 1 for him. Ditto Mae Clarke as Elizabeth, Edward van Sloan as Dr. Wadman, and John Boles as Victor Moritz. They're all known for “Frankenstein” but the guy who played Frankenstein's Monster is not known for Frankenstein because he didn't star in it. He starred in other things afterwards because this movie made him a star. It made him known. And that's why he's not known for it.
See the cat? See the cradle?
This is the thing IMDb needs to fix. One of the things. You're missing the overall, as Deep Throat said to Bob Woodward.
Saturday September 17, 2022
Movie Review: Knock on Any Door (1949)
WARNING: SPOILERS
The main tension in “Knock on Any Door” is between its social-reform message—Nick “Pretty Boy” Romano (John Derek) got a series of bad breaks, and we as a society are as much to blame as him—and the fact that Nick is an unlikeable little shit.
Maybe it’s the character as written but I think it’s John Derek. Some actors (Cagney, Brando) can make bad men likeable. It probably has something to do with an honesty in their performance, which is exactly what we don’t get here. Nick feels false throughout. He pouts, he cries, he combs his hair. At least that last part was historically interesting. We have several scenes where Nick whips out his comb and spends 15, 20 seconds of screentime making it just so. In one, he’s wearing a kind of leather jacket, so even though the movie was released in 1949 it feels classically 1950s to me. It’s ur-Fonzie.
We almost did get Brando in the role, by the way. This the first film by Humphrey Bogart’s production company, Santana Pictures, so Bogie got to handpick his coworkers. To direct, he tapped relative newbie Nicholas Ray, whose debut production, “They Live By Night,” Bogart had seen and admired; and he also visited Marlon Brando during his “A Streetcar Named Desire” run on Broadway to pitch the role of Nick. Imagine that. Would’ve been a whole other movie if that happened. Instead, this.
What a loveable character
It begins well. There’s a robbery, a cop is killed, and in the aftermath we get a “Round up the usual suspects” moment as the cops nab anyone with a police record—including Nick. When Bogart, playing Andrew Morton, Nick’s lawyer, gets the phone call that Nick has been arrested, he initially begs off, because he’s sick of the kid. At home playing chess with his wife—we later find out she’s a social worker—she gives him a look. He defends himself, she gives him another look, and he keeps defending himself while admitting sure, maybe, OK. Finally, without a word from her, he gives in and agrees to talk to Nick: “Anything to keep you quiet.” Great bit.
For a time, he investigates. He visits the old neighborhood and sees a character named Junior, old, stooped, selling newspapers.
Bogie: How is it, Junior? Ah, you look just about the same.
Junior: A little older, a little more tired, a little more confused.
I could’ve spent another 20 minutes with just them talking.
Instead the trial begins. And during his opening statement, Morton decides to tell the jury Nick’s story—so the prosecution can’t use it against him, and because he hopes to engender sympathy for the kid. Immediately I had a bad feeling: “Oh shit, this isn’t the movie, is it? This flashback?” No, but half of it.
Why is Nick a shitty kid? Well, his dad was a hard-working grocer who was railroaded into jail for defending himself against a customer coming at him with a knife. Morton was the guy who was supposed to defend him, but, busy, he passed the case to an associate who didn’t do due diligence. Dad got a year, and him with a bum ticker. Morton finds out four months into the stretch, and just as he’s visiting the family in their home, promising to get the old man out, they find out he died of a heart attack. And Nick gives Morton a searing look. Well, “searing.” Searing and pouty.
The move to the “bad neighborhood” actually made me flash on Donald Trump, believe it or not. One day Nick’s bringing home groceries and two kids—one looking about 40—attack him. The blonde kid starts it. In the middle of a handshake, he yanks Nick toward him and they start pummeling. Trump used to do that yanking thing. Remember that? Even as president. Even greeting foreign dignitaries or SCOTUS justices. God, what an ass. I’d almost forgotten that part of what an ass he is. There are just so many parts.
For some reason, being attacked by juvenile delinquents turns Nick into a juvenile delinquent. While his family struggles, Nick combs his hair and hangs out with his jerkoff friends. They steal watches and hock them. (Cf., “The Public Enemy.”) But they’re soon nabbed and sent to reform school, where they’re forced to participate in something called a “burlap party.” I guess it was a thing back then? A basement is flooded and the boys are forced to dry it with burlap material that they constantly have to ring out. In the midst, the blonde kid starts coughing and you know he ain’t long for the world. Then Morton visits. It’s after the war, he lets Nick know his family is doing fine in Seattle, but Nick’s got a chip on his shoulder larger than the Pacific Northwest. Among the barbs he directs at a guy just trying to help him:
- Don’t sing me lullabies, mister!
- Oh sure, maybe you can get me a job. Winding an eight-day clock!
- You wanna do something for me? Remember me in your prayers!
To which Bogart has the line of the movie: “Boy oh boy, what a loveable character they made out of you.” Yep. Nick’s the kid gone wrong you don’t care about at all. The problem is he doesn’t seem deprived, he seems spoiled.
When he gets out, he has a bunch of hangers-on while he gets a haircut—as if he’s already a gangster. He’s not. He makes dough knocking over candy stores. And he can’t even do that right because he falls in love with the girl running the store, Emma (Allene Roberts), who’s innocent and talks in an annoying whisper. For her, he tries to go straight. But then he overhears one of Bogie’s law partners expressing doubts about him, and he gets pouty-angry again, throws a bottle against a wall, and steals cash from Bogie’s wallet. In an alleyway, Bogie takes it back, and the kid tries to go straight again. He doesn’t, and he’s going to leave Emma (because she’s too good for him), even after finding out she’s pregnant; so, per mid-century melodramas, she turns on the gas oven.
Anyway, that's why he is the way he is.
In the present, in court, Bogie makes mincemeat out of the prosecution’s case. The DA with the scar down his cheek (George Macready), like he's central-casting Getapo, can’t get Nick’s friends to shake their story that he was with them at the time of the killing, but Morton gets a government eyewitness to admit he only IDed Nick because the cops told him to. Bogie’s got the case won … until Nick agrees to testify in his own defense. And because the DA badgers him, histrionically, and because Nick remembers Emma and all her goodness, Nick breaks down on the stand and confesses—yes, yes, he did kill the cop! During the sentencing phase, Bogie lets us all know the movie’s theme (“Yes, Nick Romano is guilty, but so are we!!”) before filling us in on the meaning of the movie’s title: “Knock on any door, and you may find … Nick Romano.” At which point, in the gallery, we cut to a greasy kid in a T-shirt combing his hair. I had to laugh out loud at that one.
Despite Bogie's shared-blame strategy, the judge still sentences Nick to death. And when Nick’s doing the dead man’s walk away from the camera, with THE END prominently placed, we can see that he’s still combing his hair. Now that’s commitment to the bit. Even Fonzie didn’t go that far.
“Knock on any door and you may find ... Nick Romano.”
Fast, young, good-looking
They must’ve known, right? That Derek wasn’t working? So why did Ray use him five years later in almost the exact same role (whiny little shit), and opposite another classic Warner Bros. gangster (James Cagney)? Derek helped ruin that one, too. Oddly, it was in Ray’s very next picture that he found the right actor for all these roles: James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause.” He made the screwed-up kid sympathetic.
Dean is also much more associated with a line that Derek repeats several times in this movie: “Live fast, die young, have a good-looking corpse.” I’ve heard that all my life, but apparently it originated here—or in Willard Motley’s 1947 novel, on which this is based.
Another historical tidbit. There’s a scene with Bogart in a nightclub, and there’s a piano player in the background. It’s Dooley Wilson, Sam from “Casablanca.” Nice to see Bogie the producer getting Dooley Wilson work. Nice to see Rick and Sam reunited in postwar America.
Rick, Sam, play it again.
Friday September 16, 2022
Roe, Griswold, Loving & Obergefell
“As the liberal Justices pointed out in their dissent, the Dobbs decision endangers other Supreme Court precedents. In particular, it leaves vulnerable the cases that established 'unenumerated rights' to privacy, intimacy, and bodily autonomy—rights that the Constitution did not explicitly name but that previous Court majorities had seen as reasonable extensions of the liberties protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Many Americans have also built their lives on precedents such as Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case confirming the constitutional right of married couples to buy and use contraception; Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 case declaring bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional; Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 case recognizing a right to same-sex intimacy; and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case recognizing a right to same-sex marriage. Would Alito grant that these decisions have created reliance interests?
The anchoring logic of Alito's opinion is that rights not stipulated in the Constitution pass muster only if they have long been part of the nation's traditions. By this standard, what is to preclude the undoing of the right to same-sex marriage guaranteed by Obergefell? Tellingly, Alito furiously dissented in that case, saying that a right to same-sex marriage was ”contrary to long-established tradition.“ Indeed, Clarence Thomas, in his Dobbs concurrence, argued that the particular cases protecting same-sex marriage and intimacy, along with contraception, were very much up for reconsideration. (Thomas left out Loving, the interracial-marriage case.)
-- Margaret Talbot, ”Justice Alito's Crusade Against a Secular America Isn't Over," The New Yorker
Friday September 16, 2022
Cagney-Chaney Connect
I've long been confused by the above shot, which is part of a series of publicity stills for “The Public Enemy” in 1931. It mirrors nothing in the film. I guess Cagney's hair dangles in front of him like so after his brother pops him one in the early going, but otherwise, no. I never quite got why they went with that look for a publicity shot.
The other day I was watching Tod Browning's 1920 gangster film “Outside the Law” (as one does), and near the end we get this shot of Lon Chaney:
Not exact but close. I'm sure Warners publicity dept. in 1931 wasn't trying to ape or homage Chaney—his was a quick shot in an 11-year-old movie in which he's third- or fourth-billed—but maybe it was stashed in the back of someone's brain, a photographer or publicity goon, or maybe it was just an early gangster staple look. “Now if you could just snarl for me. Yeah, and muss your hair so it falls over your forehead. That's it!”
Cagney would play Chaney a quarter-century later in the biopic “Man of a Thousand Faces” but by then he was all wrong for the role.
Wednesday September 14, 2022
Movie Review: Alibi (1929)
WARNING: SPOILERS
The crime at the center of the film—for which the titular alibi becomes necessary—involves a warehouse fur heist gone wrong, leading to the death of a passing cop.
Yes, it’s the same crime Tom Powers and company would commit in “The Public Enemy” two years later (and parodied two years after that in “Little Giant”). So did Bright and Glasmon lift the idea from screenwriters Roland West and C. Gardner Sullivan, who were adapting the 1927 stage play “Nightstick”? Or were warehouse fur robberies a big deal in the 1920s?
“Alibi” is one of the first gangster films of the sound era, so most of the actors speak in that odd, slow, dreamlike cadence of early talkies rather than the snappy patter of a Cagney or Robinson. But we get some great shots from director Roland West: the shadow of the detective outside the door while Soft Malone (Elmer Ballard) is being grilled; Billy Morgan (Regis Toomey in his film debut) drunkenly reaching for booze; the rooftop escape of Chick Williams (Chester Morris, nominated for an Oscar).
Most unexpected? A pretty good mid-movie reveal.
Cops just don’t understand
It begins the way “The Big House” (also starring Morris) began a year later: with the robotic clomping of the feet of marching prisoners. One is singled out. He’s shown a piece of paper with his prison ID on it, “No. 1065,” and it morphs into his name, “Chick Williams.” When we next see him, he’s wearing a suit, rather than his prison grays, and shaking the guard’s hand on the way out. Nice bit.
Then we’re a nightclub run by Buck Bachman (Harry Stubbs), with the dancing girls and singers of the era. Chick is there with his girl, Joan (Eleanor Griffith), at a table with Buck and his wise-cracking moll Daisy (Mae Busch), and they’re talking about the bum rap Chick got. A drunk stumbles over. It’s Billy Morgan, boy stockbroker. He’s got an eye for Joan and engages in some shenanigans to get her address. Buck calls him harmless. We wonder.
For the first half, it feels like a wronged-man movie. Chick is courting Joan, the daughter of Sgt. Paul Manning (Purnell Pratt), but the old man hates Chick, whom he calls a jailbird, and wants Joan to marry Det. Tommy Glennon (Pat O’Malley). But Joan doesn't want to marry a cop. Some of her thoughts feel on the matter feel surprisingly contemporary:
Tommy: Now what’s the matter with policemen?
Joan: They’re man hunters. They’re cruel and merciless—always hounding some poor devil and sending him to jail. They think themselves great heroes.
Tommy: Well, we’ve got to uphold the law.
Joan: Law! Is third-degreeing—bull-dogging people into confessing crimes they didn’t commit—is that law?
Tommy: No, but... Oh, I don’t understand.
Joan: Of course you don’t. You’re a policeman.
Much of the film bears her out, too. When Dad finds out Chick and Joan got married, he literally locks up his daughter like she’s in a fairy tale. Then he tries to railroad Chick into jail again by pinning the fur heist/cop killing on him with zero evidence. When his own daughter provides the alibi—that they were at the National Theater that night—Dad sends Tommy to see if it was theoretically possible for Chick to have committed the crime. And it was! The show has an intermission between 9:55 and 10:05, and the cop was killed at 10 PM—just five minute away.
Which is when they start sweating witnesses, specifically Soft Malone, who was seen driving away from the scene of the crime. How do they sweat him? They threaten to kill him. Here’s Tommy:
You ever know what happened to Gimpy Jackson after he shot a cop? He just disappeared.
A few minutes later, he gets more specific:
How’d you like to be buried next to Gimpy Jackson, Soft?
Holy crap. At this point, I’m thinking: Well, the movie was independently produced, by West, and distributed by United Artists, and it was pre-code, so cops didn’t have to be heroes. Even so, it felt revelatory: The cops are the bad guys!
All that strongarming works, too: Soft gives up a name, and it’s Chick’s. So Dad got what he wanted. And now they’re going after him.
Which is when we get our second reveal.
The first reveal is that Billy Morgan, the drunk broker who finagles Joan’s address, is in fact an undercover cop, Danny McGann. The second reveal is that our poor put-upon hero is in fact a cold-blooded cop killer. Dad was right: Chick actually runs the gang; Buck is a flunky. When Chick discovers that Soft Malone has been pinched, he looks for a respectable citizen who might “verify” that Chick phoned him at 10 PM from the National Theater on the night of the killing. Guess who he chooses? Billy Morgan, boy broker.
All of that is kind of fun. Everything is the opposite of what it seemed in the first half:
- Put-upon hero is ruthless killer
- Drunk lech is hero cop
- Soft-voiced cop is tough hero
- Outspoken woman is absolute idiot
Yes, that means the movie's hero, Tommy, also threatened to kill a witness in cold blood. But I guess you can’t have everything.
What cowards these criminals be
My favorite character is Daisy. She’s a smart cookie who’s stuck with Buck, a dull lump, and she gets off some of the best lines. After everything goes awry, he tells her to pack a suitcase, she balks, and he pushes her head-first into a door. (Makes a grapefruit-to-the-face seem loving.) Shortly thereafter, Chick arrives, sees Joan on the phone (unknowingly alerting the cops to their whereabouts), and starts yelling at Buck.
Chick: What do you mean letting her use that phone? I oughta break your neck.
Daisy: Oh please. Don’t talk about it. Do it.
As revolutionary as the movie seems early on, with Joan’s diatribe against coppers, it winds up at the other, more predictable extreme, with Tommy not only catching Chick but taunting him into proving what a coward he is. That said, Chick’s death is handled well. He escapes to the rooftop, jumps to another building, barely makes it, then loses his balance and falls silently to his death. I flashed on Roth’s death in Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead.”
It’s not a bad little movie, totally undeserving of its current 5.7 IMDb rating. Don’t think Morris deserved his Oscar nom, but I guess the mid-movie switcheroo impressed early Academy voters. Set design is crazy fun: those art-deco doors of early talkies, along with almost Dali-esque wallpaper.
Director Roland West is probably best known today for being a suspect in the 1935 death of Thelma Todd, his one-time lover and business partner (of Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café), whose body was found in West’s garage in a still-running Packard convertible. He directed several good Lon Chaney movies in the silent era, and obviously made the transition to talkies well enough, so I’m not sure what happened to him. His last film, as director or producer, was “Corsair” in 1931, starring Chester Morris and Thelma Todd. He also has several ur-superhero connections. His 1926 silent film, “The Bat,” was part of the inspiration for Batman, while West later married Lola Lane, one of the Lane sisters (“Four Daughters,” “Four Wives”), whose name, yes, helped inspire Jerry Siegel’s Daily Planet reporter.
West died in 1952, age 65. In his obit, “Alibi” is called “one of the greatest hits in motion picture history.” It wasn't, then or now, but it's better than 5.7.
SLIDESHOW
Tuesday September 13, 2022
Emmys Need an Enema
I watched most of the Emmys last night and tweeted some of my disappointment with the show. Not with the winners—although my vote goes to “Barry” for comedy, and my vote (and my heart) goes to Rhea Seehorn for “Better Call Saul”—but more with the show's presentation. Didn't get much engagement from those tweets, but today I read Michael Schulman's piece in The New Yorker, “Cringe-Watching the 2022 Emmys” and felt seen. Example:
Despite celebrating the craft of television, the ceremony was ineptly written and paced. Thompson's comedy interludes had a wocka-wocka desperation about them, and the formerly low-key job of announcer went to the comedian Sam Jay, who stole focus with contrived introductions of the presenters. (“You've seen them on 'Black Bird,' but they've never been mentioned on Black Twitter. . . .”) For whatever reason, not all the presenters could be trusted to read off the nominees, which were sometimes announced before the presenters walked onstage, and the “In Memoriam” sequence was shot from angles that made it difficult to see the names of some of the departed. In the d.j. booth—because somehow having a celebrity d.j. has become mandatory at awards shows—was a fellow called Zedd, whose idea of wit was bringing up “Succession” 's Jesse Armstrong to “Shake Your Booty.” The play-off music, just as subtly, included “Time to Say Goodbye,” and kept things moving at a brutal clip. Instead of letting the winners build up to real emotion, the broadcast shooed them off to make time for the stars of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” (tastelessly introduced as “two cops no one wants to see defunded”) to go on a chase for a stolen Emmy.
Agree on all of it. I don't need the house-party vibe. I don't need extra bits. I like comedy, I like songs, but mostly just celebrate the craft. Celebrate the people. That's why we're there. We like you, we really like you. So get on with it.
And next year, give a fucking statuetee to Rhea Seehorn. For God's sake.
Saturday September 10, 2022
Movie Review: The Criminal Code (1930)
WARNING: SPOILERS
My favorite moment is a line reading from Boris Karloff.
Three men are in a jail cell and the youngest, Robert Graham (Philips Holmes), gets hysterical after he receives word that—shades of “White Heat”—his mother has died. A guard, Captain Gleason (DeWitt Jennings), who is not so much sadistic as just a big fat jerk, wants to know what the commotion is. Jim (Otto Hoffman), the old hand, says they got the kid under control but Gleason isn’t satisfied. “No con under me can yowl that way and throw this pen into a panic—kick him over here.” At which point the camera focuses on Galloway (Karloff), who says, slowly and plainly, “Come in and get him.”
It’s not an overt threat, it’s just filled with underlying menace. I was like: Holy shit.
Earlier, before the telegram, as the other two talk, Galloway is mostly silent, reading his newspaper. Then we get his back story. He’d been sentenced to 20 years, got out after eight, and went to a speakeasy to wash the taste of the place out of his mouth. But he was spotted, ratted on, and sent back for the remaining 12. “Twelve years, for one lousy glass of beer,” he says. “The guy that squealed is in here, too. I’ve got an appointment with him—and 12 years to keep it.”
Gleason is the guy who squealed.
All of which made me think that even if Karloff didn’t become famous for “Frankenstein,” we still would’ve heard of him. Who knows, maybe “Frankenstein” unfairly stuck him in a genre, horror, that tends to the cheesy and slapdash.
A man must have a code
Karloff isn’t the hero of “The Criminal Code” but might as well be. He’s the guy who enforces the second kind of criminal code.
Yes, the title has a double meaning. To the lawmen, it’s the code against criminals—to throw the book at them, basically. To the prisoners, it’s the code of criminals, a code of honor, which begins and ends with: Don’t snitch. Galloway is the one who embodies this latter aspect. He kills the cowardly prison snitch, Runch (Clark Marshall), going after him slowly and stiff-legged, almost like a precursor to “Frankenstein”; and when Graham gets solitary for not snitching on the killing, and may get worse when other cons send him a knife, it’s Galloway to the rescue. “That kid don’t take no rap for me,” he says. “I’m going to keep an appointment.” The one with Gleason.
The ostensible hero, though, is Mark Brady (Walter Huston), who begins the movie as a crusading district attorney, unsuccessfully runs for governor, and is then appointed prison warden. Huston gets one good scene. He prosecuted a bunch of the cons himself, they’re plotting against him, and when they see him in a window they start yammering. Just a lot of noise. So Brady goes down to the yard himself. Outside, he lights a cigar, and walks into a sea of parting cons. The yammering stops. He stares straight at them, and then at one con in particular. “Hello, Tex.” Long pause. Tex bends his head. “Hi, Mr. Brady.” And that’s that. He’s won the day. I don’t buy the scene but Huston sells it well.
I just didn’t like Brady. He’s the one who first annunciates the lawman’s version of the criminal code. The movie opens with an accidental murder by Graham (nightclub, jerk, bottle), and, looking at the evidence, Brady talks about how he could get the kid off if he were his defense lawyer. “It’s just a rotten break, that’s all,” he says. But when the kid’s out-of-his-element attorney suggests 10 years on a manslaughter charge is too much, Brady jumps down his throat:
Good lord, man, what do you want? There’s a boy lying on a slab in the morgue. That’s a big piece out of his life—all of it. Somebody’s got to pay for that! An eye for an eye. That’s the basis and foundation of the criminal code. Somebody’s got to pay!
These words are repeated throughout the film. Galloway uses similar ones when talking about Runch and the other criminal code: “He squealed, turned on his pals, and a man’s dead. Somebody’s got to pay for that.” Then when the kid is left holding the bag for Runch’s death, and Brady suspects his innocence and is trying to sweat it out of him, Brady’s original words are tossed back at him by the state’s attorney (Russell Hopton), who wants someone charged ASAP:
A man’s dead and somebody’s got to pay! An eye for an eye! That’s the basis and foundation of our criminal code, Mr. Brady.
Not a bad structure: the first-act criminal code puts a poor kid in prison, the second-act criminal code leads to the death of a prison snitch—for which that same kid might unfairly have to pay if the third-act criminal code is pushed forward. But it’s not. When the state’s attorney leaves his office, Brady lights a cigar, looks after him, and says “fathead.” He says it twice. One gets the feeling the second “fathead” is for his earlier self—the one without empathy.
There’s also a romance between Graham and the warden’s daughter (Constance Cummings, making her film debut), which isn’t bad, considering it’s a romance between a con and the warden’s daughter.
How does it all play out? As Brady sweats Graham, one con (Andy Devine!) sends Graham a knife, Galloway says enough of that and gets himself tossed in the hole, too. There, after a failed shootout, he throws the gun out but grabs the kid’s knife and uses it to kill Gleason; then he’s killed himself. The warden then reunites his daughter with Graham—without even a shower for the kid—and they hug and kiss and profess their love, while Brady repeats the line he told Graham before sending him away: “That’s the way things break sometimes.”
Right. At this point, I already miss Karloff.
The death of Runch: Frankenstein before Frankenstein.
Early QT
The movie’s got a good opening anyway. Two detectives are playing pinochle at the station, a call comes in about a fight at Spelvin’s Café, and they’re told to get going. They do, but their minds are hardly on the work:
Cop 1: By my rules you owe me 42 cents.
Cop 2: That’s you all over: arbitrary.
Cop 1: I don’t know what arbitrary means but you still owe me 42 cents!
Dudes on a case talking about everything but the case. It’s like Tarantino 60 years before Tarantino.
I also like an early scene in the D.A.’s office when the girl the fight/murder was over, sitting next to Brady’s desk, inches her skirt just above the knee to distract Brady. “Pull down the shade,” he says to her.
Howard Hawks directed this before he became Howard Hawks. (His next film was “Scarface.”) Seton I. Miller was one of two men adapting it (from a stage play by Martin Flavin), while James Wong Howe was one of two cinematographers on the project. Back then he was sometimes credited as James Howe but this is the only time his name was misspelled: “James How.”
Thursday September 08, 2022
The Random-Nut Memo
“I remember, when I was reporting on the book, Mitt Romney said to me, 'One of the first things you learn in politician school is: Don't say something that's going to inflame the random nut out there.' And Donald Trump never got the random-nut memo.”
-- Journalist Mark Leibovich last week on the “Stay Tuned with Preet” podcast. Thought of it again reading Ruby Cramer's excellent piece on the threats on the life of Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and other Democratic members of Congress. And it's not just Trump. It's Fox, and right-wing talk radio, and that crowd. I remember after Obama got elected, how Fox News upped the rhetoric against him, and the concern I had for this very reason. Today, the nuts are much more numerous and much less random.
Tuesday September 06, 2022
Movie Review: Barbary Coast (1935)
WARNING: SPOIILERS
Didn’t a famous director once say that the drama on a movie set is often more interesting than the drama in the movie? I thought it was Hitchcock, and I thought it led to Truffaut’s “Day for Night,” but I’m not not finding any on that online. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place.
Whoever said it, you could apply it to “Barbary Coast.” The story in the movie is silly—dictated by its time and stars. A hifalutin dame, Mary Rutledge (Miriam Hopkins), soon nicknamed “Swan,” is set to land in gold-mad, 1850s San Francisco, the notorious Barbary Coast, to be the bride of a man she’d never met: Dan Morgan. Except Mr. Morgan, he dead. So she waits for the alpha dog to emerge. That’s Luis Chamalis (Edward G. Robinson), who runs the Bella Donna, a saloon/casino that cheats the prospectors out of their scraped-together findings. Swan, dressed in frilly white, does the same, while putting off the amorous advances of Luis. Then she falls in love with a tall, poetry-spouting prospector, Jim Carmichael (Joel McCrea), but lies to him about her background. When he discovers the truth—just before the boat back to NYC and his beloved Gramercy Park—he gambles his earnings, she cheats him of them, and they’re both like “Fine!” But in the final act—as citizens form vigilante squads and string up the gangsters—they find love again and are ready to leave the place. But no, Luis won't have it, and he wings Jim and is about to kill him when Mary convinces him to let them go so they can blah blah. And he surrenders himself to the mob to die. And the lovers blah blah.
Yeah, blah. But behind the scenes? Wow.
In his autobiography, Robinson writes admiringly of Jean Arthur, his previous co-star in “The Whole Town’s Talking”: “She was whimsical without being silly, unique without being nutty, a theatrical personality who was an untheatrical person. She was a delight to work with and to know.”
Next graph, he lowers the boom: “Miriam Hopkins, on the other hand, was a horror.”
He enumerates the problems. She was always late, changed dialogue, missed her marks, tried to upstage her co-stars, particularly Robinson, and was generally theatrical and haughty. For her closeups, Robinson read with her; for his, she couldn’t be bothered and the chore went to a script girl. In one scene he had to slap her, and he wanted to rehearse it so it would look real and not hurt. She wanted it once and done, and told him to slap her for real. “I slapped her so you could hear it all over the set,” he wrote. “And the cast and crew burst into applause.” His implication is everyone else was sick of her, too, but who knows? Maybe they admired her dedication to the craft? Or that it was one and done?
Such tensions, I'm sure, aren't untypical. But this is what I’m getting at:
In addition, the set of Barbary Coast was highly politicized. … [screenwriters] Hecht and MacArthur were liberals; Howard Hawks, Miriam Hopkins, Joel McCrea Walter Brennan and Harry Carey were not liberals. … F.D.R. was still in his first term, and anti-administration forces were calling the New Deal un-American, Bolshevik, communist and socialist. These inflammatory points of view were constantly being aired on the set …The wealthy, the celebrated, the successful (and, realize, I could now count myself among them), saw F.D.R. as an enemy trying to change the fundamental fabric of the Republic. On the other hand, we saw him as a man trying to save capitalism by dealing with the fundamental inequities in the nation.
Robinson doesn’t go into how this politicization manifested itself—probably with the usual arguments—but plus ca change, right? These forces are still trying to undo the latest progressive step: Obamacare, Obergefell, abortion. Some are still trying to undo the New Deal.
And just think of the relevance to Robinson. Nine years later, Hawks helped found, and Brennan became a prominent member of, The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a right-wing Hollywood org that worked in tandem with Hoover’s FBI and HUAC to help create the circumstances that led to the Hollywood Blacklist, which curtailed Robinson’s career. A liberal, he was attacked for speaking out against Fascism but not Communism, and was forced to appear before HUAC and trout out a confessional article “How the Reds made a Sucker Out of Me” for American Legion Magazine in 1952. He had to go hat-in-hand to Ward Fucking Bond to get work again. And even then it was B pictures.
That’s your story. “Barbary Coast” is bullshit in comparison.
White woman
I first heard the phrase “Barbary Coast” in 1975 when William Shatner starred in a short-lived TV series by that name. I don’t think I watched it much, despite Capt. Kirk. It didn’t zip to me. It was stuck in the mud.
For some reason, in the mid-1930s, we got an influx of movies set there: this one (released Sept. 1935), Cagney’s “Frisco Kid” (Nov. 1935), and Clark Gable in “San Francisco” (June 1936), which updates things to the 1906 earthquake, and which was a runaway smash hit. So was it just that Hollywood tendency to do what everyone else is doing? Or a novel way to use modern gangster-actors in non-modern settings? Maybe the production code growing teeth in 1934 made producers look toward, you know, “simpler times.”
The “W” word is dropped early: white. Mary Rutledge creates a sensation because she’s basically the first white woman in San Francisco. When she’s rowed ashore in the fog by journalist Col. Marcus Aurelius Cobb (Frank Craven) and Old Atrocity (Brennan), we get this exchange:
Man: Who ya got there?
Old Atrocity: A white woman!
Man: Ah, yer lyin’!
Old Atrocity: No, I ain’t! She’s a New York white woman. Whiter than a hen’s egg!
Man: Whooo!
It’s New Year’s Eve, some white men are having fun cutting the pigtails off of Chinamen (as one does), and Mary and Luis toast each other. The next morning a deal is struck in the vague way of code movies. He offers protection, a position, and a way to make a mint. And she offers? I guess her plumage at the roulette wheel. In any non-code movie, he would also get her, i.e., sex, but this is code, so no. Plus it’s Robinson. He never gets the girl. He’s always desperately on the outside of that exchange.
McCrea doesn’t show up until about 40 minutes in. He’s good. He should’ve had more scenes with Robinson because they’re so opposite: tall, handsome, and an easy-going mark, vs. short, conniving, and having zero luck with the ladies. Could’ve done without the bad poetry, but I guess Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, and probably Columbia, thought it high-class.
The movie never quite coalesces or resonates. In an early scene, the men in town carry the newly arrived Mary across the street so she doesn’t get mud on her dress, and unfortunately the movie does the same. It wants her innocent and mud-free when she’s more cutthroat than that. For half the film, she’s bilking the schmucks.
Older man
There’s also a subplot with Mary’s original protector, Col. Cobb, who decides to publish a newspaper in town. But when he tries to get involved with progressive reform, he’s killed by Luis’ muscle, Knuckles Jacoby (Brian Donlevy). I remember thinking, “Sure, Donlevy again,” but this was actually his first such role. Before this, he’d just been in silents and shorts. A string of 1935 flicks led to a long career expertly playing heavies.
The actor who plays Cobb, Frank Craven, was an old theater friend of Robinson’s, and, despite being a rock-ribbed Republican, the two had a good time reminiscing. But Robinson noticed Craven had gotten older, and it made him realize that so had he. He was 41 now, with more past than future, and “I didn’t like it.” That said, a few years later, Craven got his biggest role yet, as Stage Manager in the original Broadway production of “Our Town,” a role he played in the movie version, too. So I guess it’s never too late.
Amazing with all the legendary talent in the room—Hecht, MacArthur, Hawks, etc., produced by Samuel Goldwyn, with costumes by Omar Kiam—that this was the result. “Frisco Kid” was much better, and it wasn’t particularly good.
Monday September 05, 2022
Repeat This Sentence Every Day Until the 2024 Election
“On December 18th, Trump hosted Flynn and a group of other election deniers in the Oval Office, where, for the first time in American history, a President would seriously entertain using the military to overturn an election.”
-- from “Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals: How Mark Milley and others in the Pentagon handled the national-security threat posed by their own Commander-in-Chief,” by Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, in The New Yorker. Recommended.