Warner Archive – Page 3 – R. Emmet Sweeney

AGAINST TYPE: HI, NELLIE (1934)

February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

December 30, 2014

Paul Muni snarled to prominence as the amoral gangster kingpin Scarface (1932), and followed it up with an expose of the prison system, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1933). He had already received an Oscar nomination for his debut performance in The Valiant (1929), so by 1934 he was a star, and a serious-minded one. Born to a Jewish family in the Austro-Hungarian empire, he came up through the Yiddish theater, made it to Broadway, and eventually earned unprecedented freedom in choosing the parts he wanted to play in Hollywood. So when histories of Muni’s career are written, few mention his little newspaper comedy from 1934, Hi, Nellie. A standard Warner Brothers quickie, it packs in screwball, romance, mystery and gangster movies into one 75 minute package. Muni clearly revels in trying out comedy, channeling his wiry energy into the clipped, slangy dialogue of a Hecht/MacArthur knockoff. And the rest of the cast is up to his challenge, with acidic performances from Glenda Farrell and Ned Sparks. Hi, Nellie is now available on DVD as part of the Warner Archive’s Forbidden Hollywood Volume 8 set of pre-codes (also including Blonde Crazy, Strangers May Kiss, and Dark Hazard).

“Either a comedy, something light and frivolous, or the story of a Slovak coal miner.” This was reportedly Muni’s response to Jack Warner about what he would like to make after the multi-generational drama The World Changes (1933). Muni was fascinated by the coal miner’s fight for unionization and better work conditions. While acting in a touring company of Counsellor At Law, Muni stopped off in a Pennsylvania mining town to interview the local workers. All of this research would turn into Black Fury (1935). But first, he did something “light and frivolous”.

Hi, Nellie was based on a story by Roy Chanslor, and turned into a script by Abem Finkel and Sidney Sutherland. Finkel was Muni’s brother-in-law, and the scion of a legendary Yiddish theater family. Abem’s father Moishe was a producer in Hungary as well as the States. Great Yiddish star Jacob Adler described Moishe in his memoir: “A tragic figure in our history, Finkel. One of the first pioneers, an excellent artist, a good director, for many years a power in our theater world, until in 1904 he put an end to his career and life with a bullet in his brain.” After Moishe’s second wife, Emma Thomashefsky, left him, he shot her, her lover, and then himself. Emma was partially paralyzed but lived until 1929. Muni’s employment of Abem was not just for nostalgia’s sake. Abem had a long career as a scenarist at WB, with an Oscar nomination for Sergeant York (1941), and credits on Jezebel (1938), Black Legion (1937) and many more.

With Abem along, Muni carried the Yiddish theater with him, and must have seen some analogues to Yiddish comedy in Chanslor story. Muni plays Samuel Bradshaw (nicknamed “Brad”), the tough-talking managing editor of the New York Times Star. The head of the governor’s investigating committee, Frank J. Canfield, has gone missing, along with $60 Million of a prominent bank’s reserves. All the tabloids connect the two stories, that Canfield absconded with the cash, but Brad refuses to publicly indict him on scant evidence. The paper’s owner J.L. Graham (Burton Churchill) is enraged, and demotes Brad down to the paper’s romance column, where he has to take on the pseudonym Nellie Nelson. The current”Heartthrobs” columnist, Brad’s ex-beau Gerry Krale (Glenda Farrell), is thrilled to get back on the city beat.Brad has to endure rounds of “Hi Nellie!” each trip through the office, sinking him into an alcohol-fueled depression – until a break in the Canfield case gets his journalistic juices flowing again. The basic plot was remade several times by Warner Brothers, as Love is On the Air (1937), You Can’t Escape Forever (1942), and The House Across the Street (1949).

Hi, Nellie was Muni’s third straight collaboration with Mervyn LeRoy (after I Was a Fugitive on a Chain Gang and The World Changes), one of WB’s most bankable directors. LeRoy topped Variety’s list of top box office directors of 1933, during which he directed Gold Diggers of 1933 and four more profitable movies. While never a distinctive artist, LeRoy was a reliable craftsman, and ably orchestrates the chaos of the Times Star’s newsroom. He establishes the geography of the office in a high-angle crane shot that scans the anthill industriousness of the constantly moving reporters/editors/newsboys. The majority of the film then uses waist-up medium shots to focus on gesture and dialogue. Muni, with a streak of gray in his hair to indicate the stresses of the job, seems to have studied the speed chatter of Lee Tracy in preparing for this role, all of his wiry strength transferred from his muscles to his words. Brad is an arrogant taskmaster who also happens to be good at his job, so when his power is taken from him, his whole self-image collapses. He ends up in a dive bar apologizing to his whiskey. But with Gerry’s admonitions ringing in his head to stop being a coward (she endured the Heartthrobs gig for much longer, and didn’t crumble), the plot shifts again into investigative mode, and Brad sets his sights on a local gangster.

The film breezes by because of the energy of the performances. Brad and Gerry have a complicated, flirtations relationship that involves a past fling and professional jealousy. Glenda Farrell had experience playing a tough-talking reporter gal from her time in the Torchy Blane series, and her self-confidence emanates off the screen. LeRoy noticed this too, and grants her one of the few tracking shots in the film, pulling back through the office as she is harassed for a date by a mousy reporter (she, as ever, declines). The other unsung hero of the film is Ned Sparks, who has a Droopy Dog face and a voice like a muted trumpet. His deadpan nasal delivery anchors the film as it revs through the too-pat coincidences of the mystery plot. His slow-motion lope and sourpuss sarcasm brings everything back to earth.

Even though it’s rather unknown today, Hi, Nellie was well-received at the time. Photoplay lauded its “trip hammer action”, while Motion Picture Daily wrote, “It moves rapidly. It is flavored with the sauce of front page life and salted with humor.” The impressively named Frederic F. Van de Water at The New Movie Magazine ranked it as “outstanding”, and praised LeRoy for having “taken the trouble to learn how a newspaper office looks and sounds.” I’m throwing my lot in with the esteemed Mr. Van de Water. Hi, Nellie is a brisk entertainment, and one which shows off the commitment and range of Paul Muni, who I never expected could have been so funny.

FINAL REPOSE: THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1945)

February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

December 16, 2014

Albert Lewin is an elusive figure in the history of Hollywood. He was an educated aesthete with a B.A. from NYU and a M.A. from Harvard who took a job as a script reader at Samuel Goldwyn studios. He swiftly rose through the ranks after Goldwyn was absorbed by MGM, and he was one of the five “Thalberg Men” who facilitated the studios success, overseeing hits like Spawn of the North and Mutiny on the Bounty. When not overseeing super productions, Lewin directed six unusual features, almost all about artistically inclined loners enmeshed in a debilitating obsession. His most famous film is his 1945 adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is now available on Blu-ray from the Warner Archive. It is a startlingly controlled production, from Hurd Hatfield’s evocatively blank lead performance to the deep focus photography of DP Harry Stradling, which gives ample space for Gray’s emptiness to expand.

Aside from the addition of a few characters, the film hews closely to Wilde’s story. It regards Dorian Gray (Hurd Hatfield), a preternaturally handsome young gentleman who becomes horrified at the thought of his aging. While gazing at the portrait of himself that had just been completed, Gray makes a passionate wish for the painting to reflect the aging process, but that his body remain young and unlined. His wish is granted. The painting reflects his true face, while he flesh becomes a mask. When his love of a nightclub singer (Angela Lansbury) encounters tragedy, Gray turns to all varieties of debauchery as a distraction, and the painting’s face becomes more and more grotesque, a rebuke to Gray’s fetishization of youth.

Every element of the movie is thought through and fussed over. The interior of Gray’s apartment is designed to look like a museum, a cold receptacle that does not seem to allow for a human presence. Hurd Hatfield gives a performance of dreamlike roboticism, as if controlled by joystick off-screen, his voice an uninflected monotone. It is incredibly bold to have a void at the center of your movie, but Lewin seems to push Hatfield more and more into nothingness, until all that’s left of him are those improbably high cheekbones. Hatfield’s face is a marvel in itself, with fine feminine features lending his face a striking asexuality. In the original publication of Wilde’s novella, references to homosexuality were removed by the publisher. In the film, Gray’s proclivities are strongly suggested in a scene where a doctor arrives and is blackmailed to aid Gray in a crime. The act for which he is being blackmailed is never stated, which becomes a proof of its own.

The one chance Gray has to escape his narcissism is in his infatuation with Sibyl Vane (Angela Lansbury), the main attraction at the seedy Two Turtles Pub. He first sees Vane on stage as she croons the schmaltzy, affecting “Goodbye Little Yellow Bird” in her singsong voice as the emcee tosses feathers in her wake. Gray sees an unaffected innocence in her performance, and returns repeatedly to bathe in her naturalness. It is in these encounters in which flickers of life still emerge behind Hatfield’s eyes. But instead of following his heart he follows the instructions of the social butterfly/philosopher of pleasure Lord Henry Wotton (George Sanders). Gray is a blank slate, and Wotton fills him up with witty, empty words of self-love. And so Gray is put on the path to self-destruction, and the painting seems to rot off the canvas.

The painting in The Picture of Dorian Gray serves a similar purpose as the curse in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, Lewin’s 1951 feature adaptation of the seafaring fable. In it, James Mason is the titular Dutchman, doomed to sail the seven seas until he finds a woman who is willing to die for him (in this case, Ava Gardner). Like the portrait, the curse is a supernatural element that isolates the central character. In the film the Dutchman is a portrait artist, using painting as an escape from his endless existence. He is more heroic than Gray, actively seeking a way out of his loneliness, whereas Gray is directed straight to oblivion. But both films are studies of men with artistic temperaments driven to solitude and drawn to madness.

The “after” painting of Gray’s ugly moral state was made by Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, who Lewin admired. Albright made exaggeratedly unforgiving self-portraits, emphasizing every flap and fold of his aging face and neck. Who better to paint Gray’s true self than that? Albright’s figures look illuminated from within, and the fantastical nature of his exaggerations often has him grouped with the magic realists. Albright was commissioned to paint both the “before” and “after” portraits of Gray, but his process was so slow-moving and demanding that he only ever completed the “after”. The “before” was ultimately painted by Henrique Medina. Albright’s portrait is one of the great movie paintings, a phantasmagoric rendering of a diseased, pustule-ridden lout, his decaying presence infecting the room around him, everything dissolving back into organic matter.

CAGNEY THE COMEDIAN: BOY MEETS GIRL (1938)

February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

December 2, 2014

By the end of 1935 James Cagney was irritated. Under his Warner Brothers contract he was assigned four-to-five movies a year, almost all in the pugilist-gangster mold. Cagney was getting burnt out on the repetition, just as he was becoming a top ten box office attraction. Seeking a higher salary as well as greater input into his roles, Cagney walked off the studio lot and sued them for back pay. He had become a bad boy on-screen as well as off. He spent his time separated from WB making a couple of small features for the independent Grand National Pictures (Great Guy (’36) and Something to Sing About (’37)). The suit was settled in 1938, and Cagney was back at work at WB. His return film was the inside-Hollywood farce Boy Meets Girl, which was a recent Broadway hit. A rapid-fire parody of tinseltown excesses — it tracks the rise and fall of a literally newborn superstar — it allowed Cagney to stretch his comic chops. He gets to enact all of his mischievous Hollywood fantasies: mouthing off to the unit production chief (Ralph Bellamy), insulting soft-headed actors and inciting extras to riot. Cagney and Pat O’Brien play exaggerated versions of the famously acerbic screenwriting team of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur as they sweet talk their way into the heart of a naive mother whose baby becomes an overnight star. This cockeyed comedy is now available on DVD from the Warner Archive.

The 1935 stage play by Bella and Samuel Spewack must have appealed to Cagney as a change of pace. Instead of intimidating through violence, here it is only his wits alone that will get him out of Hollywood alive, or at least a decent paycheck. The Spewacks wrote the screenplay adaptation, having to sidestep the Production Code requirements that were then already in force. The mother could no longer be unwed, and unknown quantities of double entendres hit the cutting room floor. Bella Spewack was a young leftist who started her writing career as a reporter for the socialist New York Call newspaper. Samuel was a stringer for the New York World, and they spent years together as Moscow correspondents at their mutual publications. They eventually married and transitioned to the theater, gaining a reputation, and sizable hits, for their high-wire farces. Their first success was Clear All Wires (1932), a comedy about their time in Moscow that was turned into a Lee Tracy film the following year. Boy Meets Girl opened on Broadway on November 27, 1935, and ran for 669 performances. It introduced the following exchange into American parlance: “‘Listen’, Benson says. ‘I’ve been writing stories for 11 years. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl.’” They went on to write the book for Kiss Me Kate (1949).

Boy Meets Girl follows the exploits of screenwriters Robert Law (Cagney) and J.C. Benson (Pat O’Brien), who are assigned to write a feature for the slow-witted cowboy star Larry Toms (Dick Foran). None of their vague, half-baked ideas please producer C. Elliott Friday (Ralph Bellamy), until a sweet, naive waitress enters the room to deliver their lunch. Susie (Marie Wilson) faints from the strain of lugging all of their turkey sandwiches, and she reveals her pregnancy. Benson and Law immediately brainstorm a story about Toms raising a baby in the Wild West, and sign Susie’s unborn child to a contract. As the embryo’s godfathers, they claim power of attorney. The baby, branded Happy, becomes a box office sensation, saving the jobs of everyone on the lot. Toms maneuvers to marry Susie in order to wrest control of Happy – but Benson and Law have a few more tricks up their sleeve (disguises, lies, switcheroos) as everyone desperately tries to hold onto their position.

The film adaptation of Boy Meets Girl is dangerously fast. Cagney was concerned audiences wouldn’t be able to follow the action it proceeded as such a pace. In his autobiography, Cagney on Cagney he recalls that, “Pat and I were harassed by the producer’s insistence on more speed.” Director Lloyd Bacon was happy to oblige. Bacon was a reliable company man who had developed a rapport with Cagney and his crew. Though not much of a stylist – Boy Meets Girl is a definitively stagebound production — he allowed for much experimentation from his actors. When Bacon got a job, wrote Cagney, he didn’t ask “‘When? Where? What? How?’ Lloyd would just say, ‘Who?’ ‘Who?’ translates to ‘Who have I got?’ and usually who he got was who he wanted to get — his gang, the stock company: Pat O’Brien, Frank McHugh, Cagney, Allen Jenkins, and others of us who worked so well with each other and with him.” This was Cagney’s drinking crew as well, referred to as his “Club” in a 1938 issue of Modern Screen. These were his collaborators and his friends, and the looseness on display is contagious.

In the early sequences O’Brien and Cagney have something a Marx Brothers mind meld going on, moving in sequence, finishing each other’s sentences, and treating Ralph Bellamy as their Margaret Dumont. They set up a vinyl recording of clacking typewriters to mask their escape to on-set hijinks. As the Busby Berkeley-esque director is about to kick them off the set, Cagney shouts, “Do you believe in the dance as an interpretive force? I do.” Then they stalk off in top hats. Later on they try on costumes from a doomed period piece Young England, donning foppish blonde wigs and castle guard garb. As the music department warbles a ballad in the background, Cagney tosses off his hair and does a little soft shoe. Benson and Law will seemingly do anything to avoid doing their jobs. They are supreme artists of the procrastinating arts, and Cagney’s devilish grin and spastic physicality combine to form the perfect expression of goofing off. When Cagney puts on a foppish disguise (squarish glasses, beret, long scarf) and steamrolls past a young radio announcer (a young, nervous-looking Ronald Reagan) and convinces Rodney to pretend to be Happy’s father, the film reaches a Marxian levels of insanity.

It’s the appearance of Susie that stirs their dormant creative juices. She is the first real person to appear, who cares not a whit for stories, stars or box office. Marie Wilson uses her saucer eyes and jittering falsetto to create a woman of unflappable sincerity. But she is no simp – she just believes in people over show business. Her pursuit of the struggling English actor Rodney (Bruce Lester) is surprisingly affecting, considering the chaos instigated all around her. She met him briefly, and his unaffected sincerity chimed with her own. Their scene together is one of unforced charm – two working class types somehow shoved together in the executive producer’s office (it’s a long story) and telling each other their dreams of success. Susie’s “secret ambition” is to attend high school, while he tries out his one line from Young England on her. They are the beating heart of a rather savage satire, one in which the entire Hollywood system is revealed to be one long con. Happy the baby is only allowed to be human once his contract runs out.

The film scored with critics but not with audiences, and in 1943 Cagney told Photoplay he wished he had never made it. That stance softened over time, as he had second thoughts while viewing it on television: “It’s the same film, but I sense that the years have done something for it — what, I don’t know.” Whatever it’s doing, the years continue to make Boy Meets Girl look good.

THE PERILS OF COLLEEN: COLLEEN MOORE IN SYNTHETIC SIN AND WHY BE GOOD?

February 22, 2020June 22, 2022 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

November 18, 2014

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Through serendipity, skill and plain dumb luck, the last two silent films featuring comedic firecracker Colleen Moore have been restored through the work of The Vitaphone Project and Warner Brothers. Presumed lost, Synthetic Sin (1929) and Why Be Good? (1929) were sitting in a Bologna archive, waiting for money and TLC to set them free. They received their restoration premieres at Film Forum in NYC, and both are risque flapper comedies in which Mrs. Moore’s high-spirited subversive tests the boundaries of accepted female behavior. Why Be Good? was just released by Warner Archive on DVD with its full Vitaphone audio (which adds synchronized sound effects and a jazzy score). Each was directed by William A. Seiter, an inventive gag man as well as a sensitive shaper of star personas, from the Dadaist antics of Wheeler and Woolsey through the stubborn independence of Ginger Rogers. One of his earlier star-whisperer jobs was for child actor Baby Peggy, in The Family Secret (1924). A preserved Library of Congress print screened at MoMA’s To Save and Project festival of film preservation last month. Though Baby Peggy and Colleen Moore are after different things (chocolate and men, respectively) they each destabilize the society around them by daring to be independent.

William A. Seiter was born in New York City in 1890, the oldest son of a prominent family who were co-owners of Higgins & Seiter, purveyors of fine china and rich cut glass. He ran away from a steady paycheck to Hollywood in 1912. He made ends meet as one of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Cops and as a Western stuntman. He got his first featured part in the 1931 biblical short The Three Wise Men (1913). According to his daughter Jessica Seiter Niblo’s memoir Movietown Baby Grows Up, her father thought he was “so bad I just quit acting.” So instead he would crash movie sets with his friend (and future director) Sidney Franklin, pretending to be assistant directors. They faked it until they made it, and Seiter started directing comedy shorts in 1915. His first great success came with a series of comedies he directed for star Reginald Denny between 1924 and 1928. Dave Kehr described Seiter’s style in the Denny films as “a kind of domestic naturalism, with lightly comic sketches of middle-class young marrieds that anticipate the situation comedies of the Fifties.” Having learned every side of the business, he was an actor’s director. One of his actors Neil Hamilton would give Seiter the most practical of praise in Photoplay: “I cannot forget the treatment accorded me by Mr. Seiter. He is that rare personality in the business who does not believe in working after four thirty. Having been an actor himself once, he realizes that a day spent in front of the cameras, with one’s vitality being slowly consumed by the terrific heat of the lights, is no easy task.”

The Family Secret (1924) is an odd amalgam of Victorian melodrama and sitcom slapstick. It was a vehicle for Baby Peggy (real name Diana Serra Cary), who had become a superstar at age five after making over 150 shorts for Century Studios between 1921 and 1923. Universal signed her to make features, and they chose to adapt the Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Little Princess, The Secret Garden) novel Editha’s Burglar, a Story for Children. Margaret Selfridge (Gladys Hulette) secretly marries Garry Holmes (Edward Earle) against the wishes of her father Sim (Frank Currier). Sim bans Garry from his home, and then has him arrested for burglary when Garry tries to see his wife and newborn baby (Cary). All of the creaky melodramatics halt when the story shifts from the parents to the child, and you can almost sense the entire cast relaxing. The movie then settles into a string of comic set pieces as Baby Peggy undermines any attempt at a functional household. She skips a reading lesson from her nanny and hides in the flour bin; brings home a stray dog whose fleas infest the spinsters at a tea party; wanders onto the streets and bonds with the lower classes, learning how to steal fruit from street urchins and rib the cops. It is that last section that is especially affecting. Peggy has no conception of money’s use value since she lives with it as a given. So on the outside she trades her dress for a banana. Seiter builds scenarios around Peggy’s natural mischievous innocence, and shapes a rickety melodrama into something improbably affecting.

Colleen Moore also exudes a mischievous innocence, but one that perpetually bumps up against the double standards that confront women. Moore’s freedom from restraint is alluring, but it is always in danger of becoming too alluring, in which case the movies pull back and reveal her to be a good girl after all. Moore had long dreamed of becoming a movie star, and kept a scrapbook of her favorite performers – aspirationally leaving the last page blank for herself. She lived a few blocks away from Essanay studios in Chicago, and she appeared for them as a background extra. Her uncle Walter Howey, the managing editor for the Chicago Examiner, got her a screen test with D.W. Griffith, since Howey had helped Griffith get Birth of a Nation and Intolerance past the censorship board. The Colleen Moore persona is synonymous with that of the “flapper”, post-WWI women who flouted conventional gender roles by smoking, drinking and sleeping with whomever they wanted. This image was popularized in the 1923 Colleen Moore film Flaming Youth, in which Moore dallies with her mother’s ex-lover. Of that movie, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously remarked, “I was the spark that lit up flaming youth, and Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused all that trouble.” With her razor-sharp bob, bamboo-thin body and bowtie lips, she became the physical embodiment of the flapper ethos. Seemingly all elbows and knees, she was the ideal angular construction to dance the Charleston, and had the impish personality to give all that movement an air of subversiveness. Moore married producer John McCormick during the production of Flaming Youth, and together they would define what flappers looked and acted like to the majority of Americans.

By 1929 the flapper character was business as usual, but Moore was still packing them into theaters. Synthetic Sin is based on a 1927 play by Frederick and Fanny Hatton, produced by McCormick, and concerns a small town girl from “Magnolia Gap” who has dreams of becoming a legendary stage tragedienne. Though the feature looks fantastic (it was projected on DCP), it is missing most of the Vitaphone “soundtrack”, which added sound effects and popular songs of the period over the silent feature. Only the last reel of this audio remains.

When hometown hero playwright Donald Anthony (Antonio Moreno) returns home to premiere a new work, every high school drama queen clamors to play the lead. Betty (Colleen Moore) and her sister Margery (Kathryn McGuire) are the most insistent. Betty is spazzy and unsophisticated, her audition more akin to a Saturday Night Live cast hopeful. It involves a “mad Ophelia” scene of flailing limbs and swinging wig pigtails that nearly choke her out. The showstopper, for me anyway, is Moore’s impression of classical pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski. She dons an Einstein fright wig, applies a bushy moustache, and slams the keys like a proto-headbanger. Seiter is always interested in the clash between high and low – as in Peggy’s trip around the working class in The Family Secret. One of his 1930s comedies, If You Could Only Cook, has an out-of work Jean Arthur convince car company president Hubert Marshall to pretend to be her husband so she can get a job as a maid.

Betty continues to travesty the high arts in Synthetic Sin by interrupting her sister’s flouncy “Grecian dance” with a gruesome blackface shuck and jive routine that might keep this movie from ever getting released on home video. Donald is convinced just enough to give Betty the part in the play – but she flops, getting laughs instead of tears. Thinking she has not suffered enough in life to become a true tragic actor, Betty travels to NYC to get a taste of the fast life. Betty is something like the first method actor. So she checks into a fleabag motel and invites every hard-looking, gun-toting gangster into her apartment for carousing. In one impressive dolly shot, Moore walks down a busy street towards a retreating camera while trying on different expressions and poses, from haughty to flirtatious, hand implanted on hip. Her attempts at vamping are hilarious – she runs her hand through her mark’s hair, staring exaggeratedly into his eyes, before getting hair gel all over her fingers and disgustedly wiping them on his lapel. Betty doesn’t belong as a criminal or a super serious artiste. She was built to be funny, though instead of getting a farce all of her own, the movie ends depressingly with Betty declaring that the only career she wants is to be Donald’s wife.

Why Be Good? proposes a different kind of conundrum. In this one Colleen Moore is well versed in the games of seduction, though deep down, the film promises us, what she really wants is marriage. Though the studio and screenwriters are still a little too wary of having a truly independent woman who can sleep with whom she wants, one look at Colleen Moore’s Charleston tells a completely different story. Moore plays the aptly named Pert Kelly, “an effervescent American girl” who is introduced winning a dance competition and then shutting everyone down with, “I’m naturally too hot for this old folks’ home.” Luckily all of the Vitaphone audio is present here to accompany her hot steppin’, and the track also has some pretty clever inventions, including a drunken rendition of “Sweet Adeline” interpreted by two muted, whining trumpets.

Though Pert is a queen by night at elaborate nightclubs like “The Boiler”, which blows steam over its already hot dancers, by day she’s a department store clerk who pines for the personnel manager Peabody Jr. (Neil Hamilton). In an inspired bit of pantomime, she rests her head on his shadow behind an office window, and then draws his face on in lipstick. He is literally a marked man, and she will get him one way or another. The conventional ending of Why Be Good? is earned — she follows her desires and ends up with what she wants, and escapes the drudgery of department store work in the process. Of course her family just can’t understand her partying ways and interest in Peabody Jr. , but in an inspiring moment of flapper cinema, she explains to her father the whole point of this proto-feminist movement:

Pop, listen to me! This is 1929 — not 1899 — I contribute as much money to this house as you do — and as long as I think it is harmless, I’m going to wear what I like, and do what I like! …I want to go out, and dance, and have fun, as long as I can, as much as I can!

The fun ended for Moore with the coming of talkies. She divorced McCormick, her first sound films flopped, and she made her last film in 1934.

LONELY RODEO: THE LUSTY MEN (1952)

February 20, 2020December 21, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

October 14, 2014

The Lusty Men is haunted by the Great Depression. It’s about economic displacement, wandering the countryside to make a buck at podunk rodeos, and where the dream of owning a home seems forever out of reach. As with most Hollywood studio projects, The Lusty Men was built out of compromise and circumstance, starting as a Life magazine article on the rodeo by Claude Stanush, and turning into a largely improvised character study by director Nicholas Ray and star Robert Mitchum. In between were a series of scripts, the first by David Dortort, and the second by Horace McCoy, who had made his name writing about Depression desperation, most famously in his novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? None of them satisfied Ray or producers Jerry Wald and Norman Krasna, so they often worked without a screenplay. It is a vulnerably acted film, as Ray teases out the fragility in Mitchum and co-stars Arthur Kennedy and Susan Hayward. It is a love triangle of sorts, but one enacted with complete honesty and forthrightness. The question is between the stability of Arthur Kennedy or the soulfulness of Mitchum, and while aesthetically it’s an easy decision (Mitchum has never been so beautiful), for characters raised dirt poor it’s a heart-wrenching choice. The Lusty Men, recently restored on 35mm by Warner Brothers, The Film Foundation and the Nicholas Ray Foundation, has finally been released on DVD by the Warner Archive (it also airs 11/4 at 1:30PM on TCM). Ever since the restored print screened at the New York Film Festival last year, I was patiently awaiting a Blu-ray release, but this will have to do. Luckily the DVD is in fine shape, aside from the beat-up archival rodeo footage which sets the stage for the drama to come.

The producing team of Jerry Wald and Norman Krasna had a distribution deal with Howard Hughes’ RKO to make sixty films in under six years, according Bernard Eisenschitz’s essential Nicholas Ray: An American Journey. The Hollywood Reporter called it “The biggest independent transaction in industry history”. They made four: Behave Yourself! (’51), The Blue Veil (’51), Clash By Night (’52) and The Lusty Men. Hughes’ legendary indecision led to projects dragging on for years. One of these was the comedy thriller Macao (’52), credited to director Josef Von Sternberg, but much of it was re-shot by Mel Ferrer and Nicholas Ray, who telegraphed Sternberg to gain his permission for the re-shoots. Sternberg responded, “I’m here in New Jersey with my rose garden, I’m close to Wall Street and my art gallery. Go ahead.” Unhappy with the results, Sternberg later told Kevin Brownlow: “Nicholas Ray is an idiot. He did terrible things to Macao.”

But Ray was in Howard Hughes’ good graces for that carpenter job, and Wald and Krasna considered him for the director on Clash By Night, since Ray was acquaintances with writer Clifford Odets from their Group Theater days. But they also needed someone to take on the Cowpoke project (later re-titled to The Lusty Men), as Robert Parrish had bowed out after seeing the Dortort script, and Wald/Krasna failed to lure Raoul Walsh or Anthony Mann. The job was Ray’s, and he threw himself into the research that Stanush provided. Eisenschitz lists “50 pages on ‘Western dialogue and colloquialisms’, 75 on ‘drought and grass problems’, 120 on ‘general research, ranching and rodeo’, plus a collection of notes…on the modern cowboy.”

The opening sequence consists of archival footage of a small town parade, followed by the local fair rodeo. These sections are scratched up, possibly from old newsreel footage, and then it cuts in to Robert Mitchum perched above a bronco, read to hang on for eight seconds. It’s a brash intrusion of the mythic into the mundane, but Ray immediately cuts to an insert of Mitchum’s hand being tied to the bronc’s hide, an image attending to the technique of the rodeo rider’s art. That cut is an example of the simplicity and clarity in which Ray and his collaborators combined the everyday and the dramatic. The story is also simple. Wes (Arthur Kennedy) and Louise (Susan Hayward) Merritt are saving up money to buy a house. Wes works on a ranch, but is lured into the rodeo by Jeff McCloud (Mitchum), a former champion rider who agrees to train Wes for a cut of any profits he might win. Wes quickly becomes a star, and his dream of home fades. Louise continues to desire that stability more than ever, and can no longer stand to endure the rodeo’s constant near-death experiences. So as Wes and Louise distance themselves, Jeff inserts himself into the gap, seeing in Louise an alternate path not taken, a safe harbor in his self-destructive life. Louise has to make some kind of choice.

There is a lot of choreography in the frame to establish their shifting relationships. Early on they invite Jeff to dinner. Afterward is the clean-up, with Louise cleaning, Wes sitting on the counter and drying, while Jeff standing coyly in a corner with a mug of coffee, undomesticated and alluring. This arrangement is repeated outside, with Wes seated on a fence, Jeff standing, and Louise pitched in between. Wes looks like a kid, and Jeff a man. Cinematographer Lee Garmes sets up the flashiest version of this composition, with Louise seated in her vehicle while Jeff and Wes are reflected in the windshield. This all sets up the dramatic arc of their characters, as each goes through a different kind of maturation. Mitchum claimed that Ray didn’t give him any marks to hit. In his usual self-deprecating manner, he described their working relationship: ”

Well, you know, a lot of directors will give you the marks. When I act, I come in and say: what page is it and where are the marks? While the director is talking to the other actors, I check out the marks, and I hit ‘em. But Nick is a fellow who likes to discuss the scenes with the actors, what they mean, what my background was…. So while he would talk to me about those things, I’d be looking for my marks. He would usually end up these speeches by saying, And also, improvise. But I couldn’t improvise the marks. Since Nick usually told the cameraman to be on the actor who had listened the most when he was telling them about their background, about Stanislavsky and those people, a lot of times I wasn’t in the scene…

So maybe it was Ray and Kennedy improvising Wes always being seated, but it’s clear much of the film was worked out on the fly, scene by scene. Since they didn’t know where they were going, each sequence has a lived-in feel. This is epitomized in the melancholy sequence when Jeff visits his old broken down family home. He crawls underneath the eaves and pulls out his childhood toys – a dime paperback, a gun, and a tobacco tin that holds two nickels. In this silent act of remembrance a whole childhood flashes by, and an outline of the man we see on-screen, enacting the Wild West fantasies he had as a kid, fantasies that wear poorly on a man pushing 40. While fondling these talismans, he is rousted by the current owner, a crusty old loner (Burt Mustin, making his film debut at age sixty-seven) who visibly softens when he hears it’s the McCloud boy. They commiserate on their lives of solitude before Jeff departs, two generations of men too frightened to settle down, build a family, share anything of themselves. While Wes learns something of humility over the course of the film, Jeff develops empathy. Having been a direct man all his life in pushing the world away, he is just as straightforward in embracing it. The close-up of Susan Hayward when Jeff declares his feelings is one of trembling astonishment. It is one of the glories of the cinema. Her lips part slightly, as if ready to throw off her ordered life. But she is a practical woman, and a poor one, and there are other things to consider.

IN A FRAME: OUT OF THE PAST (1947)

February 20, 2020February 20, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

September 2, 2014

Jeff Markham knew Kathie would not arrive, but he sat there and drank anyway. He was resigned to his premonitions, seemingly able to tell the future but powerless to stop it. “I think I’m in a frame…I don’t know. All I can see is the frame. I’m going in there now to look at the picture.” The picture remains obscure to Jeff throughout Out of the Past, though the film image itself is luminous in the new Blu-ray from the Warner Archive. Jeff, played by Robert Mitchum as a slow-motion somnambulist, can see the outline of his fate, but not the details. Director Jacques Tourneur and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca previously collaborated on Cat People, and continue their use of low-key lighting to produce dream-like suggestions of violence. All of the deaths in Out of the Past are hidden off-screen, the specifics elided. They simply accrue in the fog of Jeff’s rueful investigation, a case that turns into a series of delaying tactics to stay alive. But he can only pause to smoke so many times before the darkness finally deigns to meet him.

Out of the Past was based on a crime novel by Daniel Mainwaring (under the pseudonym Geoffrey Homes) entitled Build My Gallows High. In 1945 RKO outbid Warner Bros. for the rights to the then unpublished book for a reported $20,000. A George Gallup poll revealed the American public’s distaste for the fatalistic title Build My Gallows High, so it was changed to Out of the Past during the pre-production. The novel was Mainwaring’s last – he had already transitioned to the higher pay of motion picture writing. So he was tasked with writing a first draft of the script – which later went through the hands of crime novelist James M. Cain (Double Indemnity)and Frank Fenton, an old RKO hand who had recently worked on the George Raft noir Nocturne, as well as multiple entries in the “Falcon” mystery series. “Homes” received sole credit upon the film’s release, though in his Film Comment article “The Past Rewritten”, Jeff Schwager read through all of the script variations and credits most of the film’s famously allusive dialogue to Fenton. Tourneur undoubtedly took a pass at it himself. As quoted in Chris Fujiwara’s The Cinema of Nightfall, interviewer Jean-Claude Biette claimed that Tourneur had “refused several times to shoot this crime film, whose script he didn’t like, until all the changes he wanted had been accepted.”

The story circles around private detective Jeff Markham (Mitchum), who is hired by gang boss Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) to track down the dame who shot him and made off with forty grand. He finds the culprit Kathie (Jane Greer), falls in love with her, and the couple drops out of sight. Their relationship disintegrates from a life on the lam, they split, and Markham goes straight, rebranding himself “Jeff Bailey” and opening a gas station. As the title indicates, Bailey is soon haunted by “Markham”, and pulled back into the poisonous web of Whit and Kathie.

The shape of the project kept shifting. RKO attempted to convince Warners to loan out Bogart, but they claimed he was booked for the next year. Then the director-actor team of Edward Dmytryk and Dick Powell was announced, as they had collaborated on Murder, My Sweet (1944) a few years before. They ultimately settled on their young leading man Robert Mitchum, whose last starring part for RKO was West of the Pecos (1945), and the reliable Tourneur, whom RKO had worked profitably with on the Val Lewton-produced horror movies like Cat People. Each casting decision would change the texture and tenor of the film. As artists both Tourneur and Mitchum were crepuscular creatures, attracted to the dreaming hours (though there are key sun-drenched sequences in Out of the Past). Mitchum, with his hooded eyes and one-beat-too-late delivery, gave off an air of laziness, though he was remarkably present as an actor. Tourneur valued this, saying that Mitchum (and Dana Andrews) “knows how to listen in a scene. There are a large number of players who don’t know how to listen. Mitchum can be silent and listen to a five minute speech. You’ll never lose sight of him and you’ll understand that he takes in what is said to him, even if he doesn’t do anything. That’s how one judges good actors.”

Watching Out of the Past for the first time in years, I started to focus on entrances and exits, and the transitional way Tourneur and Musuruca light them. The most famous example is when Kathie is first introduced, walking into a Mexican cantina. There is a blazing white light outside the door, rendering her almost invisible. Her white dress and sun hat blend into this brightness, so when she walks into the shade of the alcove her silhouette seems to emerge out of nothingness. She is a phantom, or a figment of Jeff’s heat-addled mind. She is a transformative figure throughout the film, given more shadings of character than the usual Madonna-Whore of film noir. She is as secretive and withholding as Jeff, but both find an excuse to playact a love affair in Acapulco. Once back in the states, they can no longer hide their true natures. Kathie has a finely tuned survival instinct that trumps any of her repressed emotions. While Jeff’s seemingly embraces his own doom. Right after he says “I’m in a frame”, he walks right into the setup, hoping to outsmart the trap. But a man with a set of survival skills like Kathie’s would leave the scene, and change into yet another name. Jeff almost seems to savor his entrapment, or has long since been resigned to it. Mitchum responds to each revelation with equanimity, as if he expected it for years. Bodies drop all around him and he is left unperturbed. He is waiting for his own, and he will embrace it when the opportunity arises, fulfilling his anti-hero’s journey.

ANIME GOES WEST: MAGIC BOY (1959)

February 20, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

July 29, 2014

In the 1950s Hiroshi Okawa wanted to make Toei Company the Disney of Asia. Toei had already become a prolific producer of jidaigeki (period drama) movies, focusing on cheaply made programmers to fill out double and triple bills. They made 104 features in 1954 alone. Toei president Okawa had grander designs, and acquired the animation company Nichido in 1956 in the hopes of competing in the international cartoon market. Toei followed the Disney formula of selecting local fables and fairy tales for adaptation, and adding on a menagerie of cute animals. They also followed the Disney edict of making only one film per year. In a test of the receptivity of the U.S. market, they released their first three films there in 1961, all through different distributors. Their first animated feature was The Tale of the White Serpent (1958), an iteration of the Chinese folktale “Legend of the White Snake”. It was dubbed and released in the U.S. as Panda and the Magic Serpent by the independent Globe Pictures. The first Japanese anime to receive substantial stateside distribution was Magic Boy, completed in Japan in 1959 and released by MGM in ’61. Alakazam the Great (1960) was released stateside by exploitation experts American International Pictures. The overseas theatrical experiment failed, though Toei’s animation wing would start a pipeline into U.S. television, becoming a staple on Saturday afternoon matinees. Now the Warner Archive has given the U.S. version of Magic Boy its first DVD release, allowing us to examine part of Okawa’s grand plan (it also airs on TCM on Monday, October 6th at 3AM).

The story of Magic Boy is an archetypal hero’s journey. Sasuke and his sister Oye live in rural harmony with a parade of adorable woodland creatures until a witch and her enthralled goons terrorize the countryside. Sasuke leaves the hearth to train with Hakuun, a renowned wise man and teacher of magic. After rigorous training montages, Sasuke has to rescue his sister from the evil clutches of the shape shifting demoness witch. Any rough details in the Japanese original are sanded down in the generic U.S. version, with each character given one attribute and chirpy vocal tone. Though if the plot is simple to the point of inanity, the images thrum with vibrant color and life. Sasuke is an annoying little moppet, but the landscapes he inhabits shift from the pretty, delicate watercolor of his wooded home to the pulsating hellish reds of the witch’s domain. The artists really go to work on the witch, who can transform into a giant sea lizard and appears in Sasuke’s nightmares as a fire-breathing wraith, as the abstracted backgrounds pulsate around her.

The senior staff at Nichido at the time they were acquired by Toei were Yasuji Mori and Akira Daikubara, who had the unenviable task of rapidly ramping up the size of the Toei Animation department so they could complete a full length feature. In the Directory of World Cinema: Japan 2, Helen McCarthy writes that the lack of experienced animators “created opportunities for other artists, like painter Koji Fukiya (1898 – 1979).” Fukiya drew lushly romantic photos for girls’ magazines like Shojo Gaho (Girls’ Illustrated) and Shojo Kurabu (Girls’ Club), detoured in Paris for a failed attempt at “fine” art, and ended his career as an illustrator for children’s books (for more on Fukiya see this fascinating article). His elongated, dreamy figures became the house style at Toei after Fukiya made the original designs for their short Dreaming Boy in 1958. His influence shows up in the design of the witch, who has a snake-like fluidity, and the Modigliani-necked Oye, who could have been plucked from one of Fukiya’s magazine covers.

If Fukiya was the elder statesman, the young firebrand was Yasuo Otsuka, who would later mentor Studio Ghibli legend Hayao Miyazaki. In order to get the job at Toei, he had to pass the animation test: draw a man striking a steel hammer against a spike, in five frames. Otsuka would be animation director for the first time on the seminal The Little Norse Prince (1968), which was Studio Ghibli standby Isao Takahata’s directorial debut, and on which Miyazaki was an assistant animator . Otsuka’s early style tended towards naturalism, and his images of a skeleton in Magic Boy were considered unintentionally funny because of how realistic they were looked in the fantastical world of the movie. He would later move on to a more malleable style, what he called “constructed realism”. He used frame rate modulation to heighten a specific action. Where Disney would use 1 frame of film for 1 animation cell, Otsuka would use three frames for one cell to add weight to movements, as detailed in this post by Daniel Thomas MacInnes.

Though highly recommended by both the trades (the Independent Exhibitors’ Film Bulletin wrote: “Delightful Japanese cartoon fantasy in color. Will entertain youngsters and many of their elders”) and the newspapers (The New York Times : “Walt Disney has no cause for abdication or even alarm. But he can jolly well move over and make room.”), Hiroshi Okawa’s plans for world theatrical domination never materialized. Toei would, however, became a dominant force in animation in Japan, thanks to the amazing influx of talent required by Okawa’s gamble.

TALL IN THE SADDLE: CLINT WALKER IN FORT DOBBS AND YELLOWSTONE KELLY

February 20, 2020June 17, 2022 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

July 8, 2014

In the late 1950s Warner Brothers was using their television properties to create stars on the cheap. One of them was Clint Walker, a former merchant marine and deputy sheriff whose freakish physique and down home sincerity carried the TV Western Cheyenne to high ratings. A March 1958 issue of Screenland checks off his measurements as if he were a prize heifer: “It’s safe to say he is the biggest man in cowboy movies. He stands six-feet-six, with an 18-inch neck, a 38-inch waist and hips so slim that he can hardly keep his gun belt up.” Signed to a seven year contract by WB in 1955 at $175 a week, Walker began chafing at his rock bottom salary, even when it was bumped to $500 (he walked off the show to protest in ’59). To placate their brooding star, WB cast him in two big screen Westerns, both directed by Gordon Douglas and scripted by Burt Kennedy (and available on DVD through the Warner Archive): Fort Dobbs (1958) and Yellowstone Kelly (1959) (they would make a third in 1961, Gold of the Seven Saints). They are lonesome works, with Walker playing an outsider plying his trade at the edges of society. In Fort Dobbs he’s a wanted murderer, while in Yellowstone Kelly he’s an individualist scout and trapper mocked by the Army brass for his sympathy towards Native Americans.

Kennedy wrote the stories for the Budd Boetticher-Rudolph Scott “Ranown cycle” of Westerns, in which the majority of violence is psychological. Fort Dobbs retains the spirit of those Boetticher films, a three-person battle of resentments between Walker, Brian Keith and Virginia Mayo. The ever-reliable Gordon Douglas keeps the focal points of the triangle shifting in the frame, and makes the dramatic Utah desert-scape constrict around its characters. The near wordless opener depicts Gar Davis (Clint Walker) storming into a house to kill a man offscreen. Douglas keeps the camera outside, the only indication of violence a broken window and the sound of a gunshot. Gar then gallops away from the posse forming to catch him, and dresses a corpse in his clothes to throw them off the scent. The desert is a repository of dead things, which is why Gar seems genuinely surprised to find a working farm out there, operated by Celia (Mayo) and her son Chad (Richard Eyer). Knowing the Comanche are on a push to drive white settlers out, he agrees to lead them to safety at the titular Fort Dobbs. Along the way Gar runs into Clett (Keith), a black market gun seller. They were old running buddies turned sour, with a history of distrust between them. Celia is led to believe Gar had killed her husband, while Clett has less than respectable designs on Celia. The whole miserable group troupes through the dirt with eyes implanted in the back of their heads. Douglas emphasizes the act of looking through POV shots through Gar’s eyes, as well as in a remarkable reaction shot from Mayo, gazing at a shirtless Gar as he cleans his gun. An unruly mix of lust, hatred and confusion flickers through her eyes. Walker is improbably good looking, but what makes him compelling is his unwavering sincerity. He delivers his lines as straight as his ramrod posture, without modulation or any kind of visible performance. With Clint, what you see is what you get, and that’s very reassuring, almost calming. He didn’t make enough films to develop a persona beyond this, like how Marion Morrison was able to workshop “John Wayne” in all those Republic B-Westerns, but what’s there is clear and true.

Wayne and John Ford were once attached to make Yellowstone Kelly. They passed, and it fell down the bureaucratic ladder to Douglas and Walker, who turned in a fine-grained epic on a budget. The studio was attracted to the story of Western trapper and Indian scout Luther Sage Kelly because of an advertisement in Variety. According to Susan Compo’s biography of Warren Oates, A Wild Life, an ad centered around Kelly ran for U.S. Savings Bonds in early 1956 with the tagline, “His calling card had claws on it.” WB registered the title Yellowstone Kelly in February of ’56. In Burt Kennedy’s script Kelly (Walker), along with his assistant Anse Harper (Edward Byrnes) get caught up in an inter-Sioux feud when they nurse a young Arapaho woman, Wahleeah (Andrea Martin), back to health. Both the Sioux chief (John Russell) and his young charge Sayapi (Ray Danton) wish to have Wahleeah as their wife. Kelly has to return her or he’ll lose access to Sioux land for his trapping. And when a power hungry army captain attempts to push the Sioux off their land, the love quadrangle turns into a war.

While the land in Fort Dobbs is a deathtrap, in Yellowstone Kelly it’s fertile, lush, and Kelly’s sole source of sustenance. The Technicolor cinematography by Carl Guthrie is rich and viridescent – bursting with life. Walker’s red felt shirt emblazons itself on the screen. The plot is one of revivification, of Kelly’s soul and Wahleeah’s body. Kelly is a loner and a bit of a nihilist, becoming skeptical of all forms of society as he lives like a monk in the Western mountains. He finds peace in work and solitude, successfully repressing needs for human contact. It is the persistent annoyance of Harper asking for a job that begins to open Kelly up to human interaction, and it is the sarcastic, flirtatious Wahleeah who re-introduces him to the possibility of love. An intelligent matching of landscape, plot and theme, Yellowstone Kelly is top notch filmmaking.

For WB, it was yet another attempt to milk their stars while they were still cheap and on their initial contracts. The film is thick with TV stars. Edward Byrnes had made his name as “Kookie” on 77 Sunset Strip, while John Russell was the lawman on Lawman. Along with maximizing their low-money contract players, using TV actors was an attempt to lure back the crowds who had abandoned film for the antenna. In an August 1958 issue of Motion Picture News, ,future New York Times film critic Vincent Canby thought these small-screen names “may well bring out to theaters that part of the so-called ‘lost’ audience which has been lost because of TV Westerns and action dramas.” Using the full force of their marketing power, WB sent Walker and Byrnes on a nationwide in-person tour, calling the two leads “Warners’ traveling salesmen.” The tactic was successful, as by all accounts the film took in healthy profits. It didn’t turn into big screen superstardom for Walker, who remained a bankable TV actor and occasional film lead. But his Westerns for Gordon Douglas should secure Walker’s legacy as one of the genre’s finest strapping soft-spoken heroes.

ON THE ROAD: DUST BE MY DESTINY (1939)

February 19, 2020February 19, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

June 24, 2014

Though it was made in 1939, Dust Be My Destiny has the feel of a Warner Brothers production at the turn of the decade, with its story of a railroad tramp framed for murder. The recession of 1937-’38 had renewed fears of economic collapse, which made the old anxieties new again. John Garfield was getting increasingly frustrated at the roles he was being provided in his WB contract, as he was continually typecast as an ex-con or criminal type who is inevitably redeemed. The character of Joe Bell in Dust Be My Destiny varies little from the template, which led Garfield to begin refusing roles, and he was punished with suspensions by the studio. The part of Bell was originally intended for James Cagney, and Garfield had become slotted as a kind of shadow Cagney, a pugnacious battler for the working class. Garfield’s politics certainly lined up with the political sentiments, but the material, he felt, was weak. Fellow lefty Robert Rossen adapted the screenplay for Dust Be My Destiny, but studio interference shifted a story intended as an anti-authoritarian Bonnie & Clyde-type tale into a conventional melodramatic romance. The failure of Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937) gave WB executives pause, causing the material from Jerome Odlum’s novel to be massaged into an unrecognizable shape. Dust Be My Destiny is a curious artifact in John Garfield’s brief, brilliant career, and is now available to view on DVD from the Warner Archive.

Warner Brothers head-of-production Hal Wallis was plugged into the development of the story even as Odlum was still completing his novel. Having written Each Dawn I Die, which was already in production at the studio (with Cagney in the lead), made Odlum a briefly in-demand presence at WB. In an interoffice memo sent to Wallis, the matter of the ending was apparently under negotiation even before the book was published:

As Odlum sees the story at the present time, he is aiming towards killing off Joe, the principal character, at the end. He feels he can do this in a tear-jerking manner. On the other hand, if you do not want the principal character killed off, and want to end the story with everybody happy, he feels he can do something about it at this stage.

While I don’t know how Odlum’s novel ended, happiness wins the day in the feature version. Seton I. Miller was brought in to rewrite the ending, which is a mash-up of seeming every popular genre of the day outside of Westerns. It starts out as a prison drama, as Joe Bell is incarcerated for a murder he did not commit. It shifts to a hobo train-hopping picture after Bell is cleared of the crime and he has to bum around for money. Then it becomes a prison farm movie after he’s busted for vagrancy, where he falls for the warden’s daughter Mabel (Priscilla Lane). And it even finds time to become a jailbreak flick, a muckraking newspaper drama, and a courtroom thriller. The result is a film-by-committee that never settles on a particular tone, and one in which any social relevance is drowned in plot twists.

The remarkable thing is that it remains watchable, thanks to the ace production team working on the feature. Max Steiner provides his usual rousing score, James Wong Howe pulls off some modest tracking shots as well as angelic close-ups of the brooding Garfield. The hobo sections are the most effective, the majority taking place on a storm-swept evening when Howe can play with low lighting. It is also where Ward Bond pops up as a short-fused stickup man who fingers Joe to the cops as a member of his gang, a lie out of spite. The spitefulness comes from a train car brawl, and one wonders how eager the two political opposites (Bond was a rabid conservative) were ready to beg off stuntmen and go after each other for real. For what it’s worth, the punches look stiff.

It is also the only time when the film captures the early ’30s WB spirit, of a certain authenticity in how working people walked and talked. There is so much static speechifying in the film it becomes a series of monologues that grind the film to a halt. Things only pick up with a succession of energetic turns by supporting players, including a Frank McHugh as a hustling theater impresario and Alan Hale as an avuncular newspaper editor. Their sheer warmth invigorates the film when the script is flagging, but they are not on-screen enough to sustain this unusual enterprise. Even film critics, those rather closed-minded fuddy duddys, were seeing how Garfield was being misused. In the New York Times, Frank S. Nugent opened his review of Dust Be My Destiny by describing John Garfield as the “official gall-and-wormwood taster for the Warners”. His lack of quality material was becoming a story, and Garfield would battle WB until his contract ran out in 1946, when he joined up with the independent Enterprise Productions, which released an inflammatory group of nine films (including Force of Evil ) before folding under the accusatory eye of HUAC. And Dust Be My Destiny led him there.

MOVIN’ ON UP: ALICE ADAMS (1935)

February 18, 2020February 18, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

May 27, 2014

The careers of Katharine Hepburn and George Stevens were forever altered by the flip of a coin. Hepburn and producer Pandro S. Berman had acquired the rights to make a film version of Booth Tarkington’s 1921 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Alice Adams for RKO. In an oft-repeated, possibly apocryphal story, they had whittled their choice of directors down to two: William Wyler and George Stevens. The coin ended up in Stevens’ favor. The film would snap Hepburn’s box-office losing streak and net her a Best Actress nomination, while the heretofore unknown Stevens would become an A-list director for decades to come. The movie, which Warner Archive has re-issued on DVD, is a bittersweet portrait of a restless Middle American girl, a working class busybody who yearns to become a sophisticated debutante and is mocked for her efforts. The patrician Hepburn is cast against type as an everyday gal, and she delivers a charmingly gawky performance of a girl masking her insecurities with constant patter and twirlingly nervous fingers. Stevens keeps everything grounded in his patient, unassuming 1930s style, capturing Alice’s many humiliations and recoveries in a slow-burning rubato tempo.

Alice Adams was first made into a film in 1923, directed by Rowland V. Lee and produced by King Vidor. Pandro S. Berman brought it back in ’35, with the country still reeling from the Depression. Centering a film on a financially-strapped small-town family probably felt like good business at the time. Hepburn was eager to adapt such a prestigious book, and tried hard to connect with the material: “I particularly liked my character in Alice Adams. It reminded me of the way small-minded people treated my mother, shunning her and us children, not because they thought we weren’t good enough, but because they thought we thought that we were too good.” Hepburn certainly needed help in conveying a “common” touch, which is why she leaned towards Stevens as her director. Wyler was born in France, and Stevens had more of the small town upbringing to lend to the production. His attitude was, “I had this wonderful book, and all I had to do was not to ruin it.”

Alice Adams is forced to wear last year’s dress and wilted violets instead of fresh roses and a new gown from Paris. Her beloved father Virgil (Fred Stone) is a lifelong clerk and current invalid, with no prospects for advancement into the middle class. So Alice has little hope in attracting her upper crust crush Arthur Russell (Fred MacMurray), until he asks her for a dance, and becomes smitten.

Her family becomes a constant source of embarrassment, with her degenerate gambler brother Walter (Frank Albertson) shooting craps with the help, while her Dad doesn’t know how to put on a suit. The whole film spins off of these class tensions, which Stevens sets up in the opening scene. Alice is introduced exiting a five-and-dime store with a new egg-shaped compact. She quickly scoots out of the exit and settles next to the doorway of an expensive jewelry shop. It is there she stops and examines her purchase, as if it were the height of luxury. The sequence begins on store marquees, which blare, “South Renford: The Town With a Future”, as if it were a place with no future only a recent time before. If the economy is on the upswing it left the Adams family behind. Alice dreams of high society, but is formulating other means of escape from South Renford. She tells her Dad that she wants to become an actress – which he immediately laughs off. South Renford has a future, but not for women. She also holds idle thoughts of becoming a secretary, at one point climbing the stairs for a training school. But then she is waylaid by Arthur, who commences wooing.

Alice’s whole life is a performance, pretending to be a member of the upper class, adding airs to her speech and walking as if on a runway. She is, essentially, faking it until she makes it. Her affectations can be hilarious, which Stevens facilitates in the two major set-pieces in the film. The first is at a grand ball, which she forces her brother to escort her to in a rickety Model T. She has become adept at hiding her low culture signifiers, so she forces Walter to park outside, so they walk through the rain to the entrance. She walks with rubberized springs in her step, and she has a endless defenses against being alone. She lures the local nerd into a dance, and then plops herself down next to an unattended dowager as if they were close relations. All of her physical and psychological might is pressed into seeming to be happy and popular. Stevens exposes the ruse in one revealing long shot, in which she sits alone, holding her hanky over the adjoining chair, as if her beau were steps away, and not just imaginary.

The other masterful sequence occurs when Alice can no longer avoid inviting Arthur over for dinner. On a sweltering hot day, her parents organize what they believe to be a high society dinner – although their knowledge of said society expired a few decades earlier. It consists of a parade of humiliations that Larry David would cringe to include in Curb Your Enthusiasm. The menu is filled with scalding hot items, making everyone break out in the sweats. They hire a maid for the occasion (Hattie McDaniel in an early role), who could care less about the proceedings. The film repeatedly associates blacks with the lower classes. When Alice walks out of the five-and-dime at the beginning, a black family precedes her. Walter shoots dice with black servants at the ball, which is a major source of embarrassment. She even says he could write a book about the “darkies” because of it. For Alice, racism is an attitude she takes on whenever she is trying to impress Arthur, to be part of the upper echelon. In 1935 this would be a wise course to take. McDaniel, hired at the last minute, is ill-prepared for the dinner. Her character is the virulent stereotype of the lazy black laborer, but McDaniel is able to shape it into something more subversive. With her incessant gum chewing and side-eye, she’s not moving slow because she’s lazy, but that she does not give a shit about these absurd white people.

The ending of Alice Adams was a major point of contention between Stevens and Berman, but as usual, the studio won out. Stevens desired that the movie end like the book, with Alice entering business school to support her family, after her relationship with Arthur falls apart. In a memo Stevens wrote, “Finishing with Alice going to business college rounds out her character in that…she has learned to stand alone and not depend on public approval, men or social acceptance.” This would have added some steel to Alice’s character, who remains lost in a fog of her own dreams of stardom. Berman felt strongly that a romantic ending was necessary, since she is such a romantic character. That is the ending on-screen, and it is almost sadder than Stevens’ intended scenario. She has fallen in love, yes, but with her quicksilver nature how long will it last? She will remain uneducated and stuck in South Renford, without a future.