Some Came Running

Tales From The Warner Archives #14: "Safe In Hell" (William Wellman, 1931)

At the risk of sounding slightly spoil-sportish, allow me to suggest good rule for the cinematic archeologist is not to always expect too much. Lord knows there are plenty of ostensibly lost gems scattered throughout the various histories and archives of histories of cinema, and I'm pretty well convinced that strictly as far as I'm concerned, there's more to be gleaned from a bad or indifferent movie made fifty or sixty or seventy or eighty years ago than there is from something like, say I Am Number Four. That's not because bad movies of the past are "better" than bad movies of the present—I mean, that's an arguable point, but it's not one that I'm prepared to get into here—but because the commonplaces and clichés and bad-faith moves of past cinema are such that they provide and interesting contrast to, or signpost for, the codes of the present. 

But I'm not talking about bad movies here anyway. I'm talking about the possible expectation that maybe EVERY pre-code Vitaphone production unearthed and displayed on TCM or by the Warner Archive is gonna represent some kind of underappreciated classic. I'm also talking about directorial reputation. One measure of the influence and impact of Andrew Sarris' 1968 book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 is the way that, four decades and change after its initial publication, there's almost a whole subgenre of criticism devoted to arguing with its categorizations and assessments. (See Kent Jones' great celebratory essay on Sarris, "Hail The Conquering Hero," collected in his exceptional Physical Evidence: Selected Film Criticism, which has this great passage: "'I can't get those fucking categories out of my head,' a friend once complained, like the woman who hears the ticking time bomb in the opening shot of Touch of Evil.) The Tom Milne monograph on Mamoulian I discussed in a below post, is very nearly a book-length attempted refutation of not just Sarris' "Less Than Meets The Eye" categorization but each of the arguments behind it. Similarly, individual essays and near-countless film blogs come to the defense of such other "Less" victims as Wilder (Sarris himself eventually copped that he had underrated Billy), Huston, Milestone, Reed, and even that most seemingly unlikely candidate for rehabilitation, Fred Zinneman Zinnemann, perpetrator of A Man For All Seasons and, gak, The Nun's Story. (UPDATE: In my juggling of reference books for this piece I got so caught up that I neglected to mention that the thoroughly estimable D. Cairns actually did a pretty persuasive job on Zinneman Zinnemann at his superb blog Shadowplay, with a series of entries beginning here.)

And then there's Wellman, and here, I think, expanded access to his output really has done the most in making a convincing case that he deserves a kick upstairs, if not to the "Pantheon," then at the very least to... "The Far Side Of Paradise?" Maybe, given the current state of micro/macro threading cinephilia, "Expressive Esoterica." To be fair, Sarris did give his famed italics to two of the six films that made up TCM Archives revelatory all-Wellman, six film Forbidden Hollywood Collection: Volume Three, and those two, the searing Heroes For Sale and the almost documentary-direct Wild Boys of the Road, both from 1933, are pretty clearly the best of the lot. But one look at the opening of 1931's Other Men's Women, with its plain but vivid location shooting creating an immediately engrossing sense of place, is enough to convince one that Sarris seriously underrated it. Or is that really the case? Is the opening of Other Men's Women really so special and so particular to what Wellman did that it's entirely apt to attribute the effectiveness of this quality to his direction, or has it more to do with the relative novelty of what we, as 21st century film watchers, are seeing? 

Such are the questions that dog the latter-day auteurist, I suppose. As far as Sarris is concerned, a substantial part of his anti-Wellman argument hinges on his dislike of one of Wellman's most-praised films, the ostensible humanist classic The Ox-Bow Incident, from 1943. Clearly Sarris can't stand this picture in the same way I can't stand High Noon (don't get me started). The film, he says, "looks grotesque today with its painted backdrops treated like the natural vistas of a Ford Western." A Wellman defender might be inspired to call on a famous exchange from Rio Bravo, wherein the question "Is that all you've got?" is answered with a pragmatic, resigned, "It's what I got." Still, on the parallel subject tip, in which Sarris says Hawks' Scarface > Wellman's The Public Enemy, McCarey's The Awful Truth > Wellman's Nothing Sacred, and Ford's They Were Expendable > Wellman's The Story Of G.I. Joe, I'd have to say he's dead on with the first two and not quite playing fair with the last example. 

But I think there's maybe some kind of consensus that Wellman's blunt, meat-and-potatoes brand of cinematic expression found perhaps its fullest flower in the down and dirty space between 1927 and 1934, and this brings us—finally, I know—to Safe In Hell, a 1931 programmer recently preserved on DVD by the aforementioned Warner Archive. And, no, it is not a lost classic or anything of the sort, but it is a brisk eye-opener, as see the below view of lead actress Dorothy Mackall. 

Awwww yeah, whazzup girlfriend, etc. And her character, Gilda (really!) is taking a call from her madame, or female pimp, or what have you, instructing her to hie to a hotel where a "lonely" guy is waiting for her. It's almost always bracing to see no-nonsese depictions of the oldest profession in "old" movies, and those among us of an age to remember when film education made the use of the word "damn" in Gone With The Wind stand for some kind of anti-censorship breakthrough, and when "hell" itself was a mild sweat word, might even be impressed by this film's title. The excitement continues when Gilda gets to the hotel and discovers that the lonely guy is, in point of fact, the very man who ruined her. There's an indignant tussle, and not only does Gilda leave the premises under the impression that she's killed the bum, but the whole damn hotel is going up in flames as she lams it. Fortunately, she's got an earnest sailor sort-of boyfriend who, after getting a little huffy about the fact that she's been, you know, having sex for money, accepts her guilty-with-an-explanation plea and smuggles her out of New Orleans, depositing her on a mysterious Caribbean island where she'll keep until they find a legit way out of this mess. Problem being, the immediate attraction of this location—that it's a great place for reprobates to go and disappear without hassle from the law—is also its greatest liability, particular in light of the fact that comely Gilda attains the not really devoutly-to-be-wished status of "only white woman on the island" (yup, those are the exact words) immediately upon stepping off the boat. The screen capture at top gives a pretty good flavor of what the white men on the island are like. (That's the ineffable Gustav von Seyffertitz at left as Larson, a former ship's captain whose criminal escapade proves especially charming in the telling.) Adding to Gilda's problem is the apparently sacred vow she took to now-once-again-absent sailor boy, to remain pure while he sails off doing his thing. Mosquito netting's not gonna be very effective in keeping any of these droolers at bay. The sole moments of respite come via the friendly natives of the island, hotel keeper Leonie, played by the charismatic Nina Mae McKinney among them. 

Not only does she serve up a delicious dinner complete with sparkling wine, she does so while singing "When It's Sleepy Time Down South." The song, later popularized by Louis Armstrong, debuted in this picture. (The Wikipedia entry on the film notes "[u]nusually for the time, the characters portrayed by the main African-American actors in the films, Nina Mae McKinney and Noble Johnson are among the most reputable in the film. Even though their parts were written in dialect in the film's script, they spoke normally in the film itself.William Wellman's biographer, Frank T. Thompson, speculated that either McKinney and Johnson, who were popular favorites at the time, had enough clout with the studio to avoid using 'Negro dialect', or else that Wellman 'just wanted to avoid a convenient cliche.'") (Some careful readers may, by the way, recall McKinney as a key figure in a salacious anecdote related by Louise Brooks in her book Lulu in Hollywood, which I won't spoil here, by way of encouraging those of you who haven't read it to go out and do so.)

In any event, tension not only mounts but breaks when a VERY unexpected new fugitive arrives on the island and not only directly makes trouble for Gilda, but stirs up the already nearly-aboil resentments of all the other guys who she's not sleeping with. Soon it's almost literally, erm, do-or-die time for Gilda, and this point yields up, for me at least, the most startling sequence of the film, in which the specific object of disgusting hangman Mr. Bruno's lust is highlighted in an iris-in that also provides a disquieting example of the Kuleshov effect.

It's a perdition-steeped shot sequence to warm the cockles of a sadism-savvy surrealist's heart, and it pole-vaults Safe in Hell briefly into a realm that transcends its tawdry moralism, which is in fact about to rear its head most definitively directly after this bit. Whether Wellman meant for this particular juxtaposition to jar so resonantly...well, would to aver so be special pleading, or is it really just anybody's guess. Maybe it's a "Subject For Future Research."

Tales from The Warner Archives #13: "The Legend of Lylah Claire" (Robert Aldrich, 1968)

When I was a kid, I had this fun idea that I thought of at the time as a nifty cinematic practical joke. Nifty albeit completely unpractical, that is. Essentially, you'd make a film that was kind of a respectable, well-cast, earnestly thought-out character drama, with conflicts and plot points and a mounting sense of urgency, and at a certain point just prior or so to what we'll call, for the sake of this particular argument, the "third act," you'd have the main characters embark on an ocean liner voyage. Something out of, you know, Dodsworth or Marnie. And then it'd be night on the ship itself, all the characters having retired for the evening, and then (and here it really was Marnie that I was envisioning, in the privacy of my warped little boy imagination) the camera would pan, say, from a closed cabin door to a porthole. The moon would shine on the ocean horizon. And then, slowly, out of the ocean, would arise...Godzilla. Who would then stride toward the liner, and once he was close enough, smack it in two, breathe fire on it, and consign all its passengers to oblivion. Followed by the end title card. 

A self-negating film, in other words, although of course I didn't think of it as such. I didn't know at the time (I think I was around 10, which puts it at 1969 or so, and no, I wasn't yet aware of the existence of Bambi Vs. Godzilla either) that Robert Aldrich had in a very real sense actually made just such a film, a film whose final two minutes or so upend and critique and lay a kind of waste to everything that had gone before, a film called The Legend of Lylah Claire, starring Kim Novak and Peter Finch and Ernest Borgnine and Coral Browne and a very young Michael Murphy, all of whom are in a sense only important to the film inasmuch as their importance to it is annihilated in the finale. 

As the above frame grab implies, the picture was Aldrich's followup to The Dirty Dozen, and only a filmmaker as purposefully perverse as Aldrich would choose such a project—a quasi-amour-fou story of a dead Hollywood sex-symbol's naive (or is she) physical doppelganger embodying said sex symbol in the passion project of the obsessed director who once loved her original—to come after the wildly popular and seminal WWII action classic. I don't know too much at all about the circumstances of its making or how Aldrich came to the material—given he's one of my favorite directors, I really ought to have read up more about him, biography-wise, but one can't do everything—but I do know that right of the bat Lylah has a somewhat chintzier, anachronistic air than many of Aldrich's other poison-pen letters to show business (which up to this point included The Big Knife, Whatever Happened To Baby Jane, and, in the  U.K.-Situated Division, The Killing of Sister George). Its 1.85 frame is more or less almost completely dominated by cramped medium shots, suggesting not so much claustrophobic atmosphere as limited production design budget. Even the office of the studio bigwig played by Borgnine feels tight, oppressive, but in a non-purposeful way. Every now and then, as in an overhead shot in which the sex-goddess doppelganger (played of course by Novak, in one of her most absorbing performances) is overwhelmed by a dizzying selection of publicity stills, the picture's visual scheme breaks out of this doldrum, but it's a rare occurence indeed. Within this matrix the film hobbles from one bit of nastiness to the next, saying that the rarefied glamour of Old Hollywood was a repressive crock on the one hand and not even bothering to point out that whatever's replaced it isn't so hot either. Few stones of deviance are unturned, and in case any of it's too subtle for you at around midpoint the picture introduces a vile steely gossip columnist named Molly Luther (a thoroughly frightening Browne), who you can look at as a throwback to Parsons or a prophecy of Finke. She has only one leg, and her prosthesis is hollow and ugly. Get it?

Things move right along, the guignol elements starting to evoke a cross between Sunset Boulevard and Aldrich's Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and while Finch doesn't do much to sell us on the notion of his character as a cinema "genius" evoking Stroheim and/or Sternberg, Novak gamely swans around in all sorts of improbable ensembles, as see below, wherein Finch clearly struggles to establish something along the lines of eye-contact.

And then comes the ending, which is even more of a shocker than the other "twist" picture of '68, Planet of the Apes, in part because it's been less set up, or I should say less blatantly set up, for us than the Apes reveal. And also because, rather than explaining or illuminating what we've seen in any kind of conventional way, it shows us that the broken thing we have been watching was created for the sole purpose of being broken even further, that what we were taking for the work of a director who could be said to have been kind of out of touch or out of synch not just with what had been going on in Hollywood but the world over was not just in on but entirely ahead of the game, but that this was something a little more complex than his just playing possum. It's a capital-S Surrealist gesture/statement that just cannot, never mind should not, be encapsulated in a verbal description, and it's what makes this new release from the Warner Archive as must-own an item as there ever was. And yeah, I admit this is the first time I've seen the damn thing. I can't imagine how I've missed it all these years, and by the same token, I'm kind of glad I didn't experience it on late-night TV while fucked up, because it woulda messed with me even more.

Tales From the Warner Archives #12: "Two Weeks In Another Town" (Vincente Minnelli, 1962)

The conventional wisdom in certain circles is that this quasi-sequel/companion piece to 1952's The Bad And The Beautiful is both a weak and weird sister to the prior film. I won't deny the "weird" part; in fact I revel in it. "Weak" I of course take issue with. If Bad/Beautiful was a kind of bittersweet poison pen envoi to Old Hollywood, an attempt to make the best of the attendant hangover after taking stock of the note of the last meeting, so to speak, Two Weeks is a meet-the-new-boss suicide note that only steps back from the ledge because...well, wait a minute, does it really step back from the ledge? Is the film's rushed (literally) happy end really putting the film's protagonist "back" in "business?" That's a tantalizing question, but in any event it's the journey to that question that gives the film its rush.

The connective tissue between Two Weeks and Bad/Beautiful could not be stronger. Two Weeks has the same producer (John Houseman), same music composer (David Raksin), same screenwriter (Charles Schnee), same leading man (Kirk Douglas), and, finally and crucially, same director (VIncente Minnelli) as the earlier film. And of course the same theme: the lunatic three-ring circus of movie-making. But rather than speaking with the droll confidence of talents who were up-and-coming tyros when the models for Bad/Beautiful were making their brilliant mistakes, Two Weeks barrels ahead with the near-lunatic desperation of the  potentially soon-to-be-washed up. The Hollywood that Minnelli and Houseman grew up in is dying or dead, replaced by the exotica and ruthless accounting of Cinecitta and international co-production. Without any reference to the politique des auteurs, Edward G. Robinson's despotic, neurotic director boasts of the "Kruger touch" in reference to his own artistic signature. Countering him is an Italian anti-showman producer who lays out a ruthless bottom line to Kruger with not even a hint of apology for being so vulgar as to care about money. Lured into this web is the cracked actor Jack Andrus, who's been keeping himself on ice in a tony nuthouse (in a sense, this is also a kind of sequel to Minnelli's great 1955 The Cobweb). Here we find another crucial point of departure from Bad/Beautiful: whereas that film was about the various interactions and reactions of its characters to the brilliant and ruthless producer Shields, Two Weeks, even in scenes that stray from its lead character, is all about the interiority of Jack Andrus, just as Godard's soon-to-come answer film to Two Weeks, Contempt, would be all about the (empty) interiority of its screenwriter protagonist. (Contempt also responds to Two Weeks' two-bit Carlo Ponti with and Ugly American vulgarian producer played by Jack Palance.) Shields and Andrus are both, of course, portrayed by Kirk Douglas, and at the same precise emotional temperature at that. But while Shields is a force of nature, Andrus is, until the very end, fate's chump. The demons that torment Jack are deliberately ridiculous, which is one reason those who call this film a "camp" classic miss the point; the heightening here is more Breughel-by-way-of-Al-Hirschfeld. Cyd Charisse's impossible ex-wife of Jack is a cross between Jessica Rabbit and Baby Jane Hudson, or something; in any event it's the most peculiar performance Charisse had ever given, or more to the point, been asked to give. Any doubt that Minnelli knew exactly what he was doing as he upped the film's ante into ever-more absurdist realms need only check out the Three-Faces-of-Claire-Trevor shot below, in which the actress, playing Kruger's appalling harridan wife, is multiplied into a veritable chorus of harpies. 

The better you know the films that surround this one—The Bad and the Beautiful, Contempt, even 8 1/2 and La Ricotta—the better you'll get this. But it is still awfully striking even on its own, and the Warner Archive disc of it is handsome indeed. There's more I could say about this film—it really is very deep, and an old favorite of mine, and Daliah Lavi, seen at top with Douglas, is both beautiful and sensitive enough in the film to inspire a good number of prose poems—but the main thing I want to convey at the moment is that you need to see it, so please do. 

Tales from The Warner Archives #11: "-30-" (Jack Webb, 1959)

In my heedless youth, with my slovenly wannabe-hippie attitude and all, I was never much of a Jack Webb fan, so I wasn't even aware of his film -30- until I read this evocative writeup of it in Michael Weldon's Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, published in 1983 (the year I turned 24): "Another Thursday night shift at the Los Angeles Banner. Jack Webb arrives late from his weekly visit to the graves of his wife and son to settle in with city editor William Conrad for eight hours of cigarettes and stale coffee. David Nelson and friends relax with 'Copy Boy' for voice and bongos, while assorted newsroom types await progress reports on a 5-year-old girl lost in the city's storm-drain system. Cannon and Friday's backups include Richard Bakalayan, Joe Flynn of McHale's Navy, and Hazel's Whitney Blake." (The writeup itself was not by Weldon but by his collaborator Charles Beesley, a very cool and taciturn customer—he looked a bit like DeNiro's Johnny Boy, without the stupid hats—who was sometimes seen in the company of Hoboken's most enigmatic musical luminaries, and who appears to have disappeared from the face of the earth. But that's another story.)

The film sounded like a little slice of heaven to a guy who still hadn't much of a clue as to what life after the college paper was going to hold for him. Cigarettes and stale coffee was my idea of some kind of breakfast of champions. Of course the film, like so many in Weldon's book at the time, seemed almost impossible to see at the time, and even when I became friendly with Weldon shortly after the book appeared, I never asked him if he had a copy I could borrow (Psychotronic pictures were often passed around like VHS or Beta samizdat by like-minded cinephiles). Maybe I was afraid the reality of the picture would disappoint me. Having now finally seen the movie via a recent DVD from the Warner Archive, I can report the film does not disappoint at all, although Beesley's writeup makes it sound a little more impressionistic and aimless than it actually is. 

For this IS a Jack Webb picture, after all, and Jack Webb pictures—not to generalize overmuch, but still—are about regular Joes doing really important things. And getting the morning paper out is an important thing, in spite of it all. The "it all" part does involve tedium and flim-flammers and editors heading up nonexistent departments, but -30- hardly takes as cynical a view of the old-school news-gathering process as does, say, The Front Page, or Front Page co-author Ben Hecht's account of his early days in newspapering in his autobiography A Child Of The Century, which it so happens I'm reading now. (See here.) Hecht's faux-pokerfaced recountings of his exploits as a "picture-chaser," going to almost any lengths (including simulating a house fire to make a family flee, the better for Hecht to break in and ransack the photo albums) to acquire pertinent photographs of victims of crime and natural disasters and such, are enough to make any contemporary ombudsman's blood run cold. In -30-, with respect to the photo of the aforementioned 5-year-old-girl stuck in the city's storm-drain system, well, at one conference an anonymous editor allows that the picture the Banner is going to run was "hustled off a next-door neighbor." Well, all right then. 

While maintaining an admirable unity of space of the sort that some critics like to cite in support of a claim of "formal rigor"—that is, the camera never leaves the newsroom during the entirety of its nearly 97-minute running time—the picture juggles multiple storylines and what they now call character arcs. The will-the-5-year-old-girl-make-it? question is of course paramount, but there's also the dilemma of the lovely female obit writer who wants a crack at a real story, but is afraid of getting it because she's the daughter of the paper's owner; the pride and anticipation of another female staffer, a longtime reporter, whose son grandson the rest of the staff never even knew she had is making a daring cross-country flight; the frustration of the copy runner stuck in a go-nowhere job, or so he thinks; and other such stuff. All of which is both driven and punctuated by lots of  newspapering nuts-and-bolts jargon, as witness this exchange between Webb's M.E. Sam Gatlin and Conrad's Jim Bathgate:

Gatlin: Jim—this shot of the catch basin, let's run it same size...across pages two and three.

Bathgate: Across both pages, 16 columns?

Gatlin: That's right.

Bathgate: No can do. 

Gatlin: Oh, can do. We'll run two eight column cuts with a gutter down the middle. Now run a type overlay, white on black, across both pages. Use 72-point Bodoni caps..."Danger, Kids: Stay Out Of These." Exclaimer. Then in lower case: "One little girl didn't."

Yeah, this Gatlin fella's got it all—the sizzle, the steak, and a great big heart that's been broken bad once and doesn't wanna get broken again. Which leads to his mule-headed resistance to his new wife's scheme to adopt a little tyke. You can likely see where all this is going, right? 

Which hardly detracts from the pleasure of it all; in fact I dare say it adds to it. In any event, when Conrad's had enough of the griping from those damn copy runners and launches into his grand, "Why sure, it's just a newspaper" speech, you may well be harumphing right along with him. -30- is as affectionate as Fuller's great Park Row, while being infinitely more mushy, and mushy-headed. But if you're one of the increasingly rare breed who still has a bit of printer's ink in his or her blood, it may well be just your preferred variety of mush. Now where's a DVD of Webb's next collaboration with screenwriter William Bowers, the ineffable The Last Time I Saw Archie?

Tales From The Warner Archives #9: "Stranger on the Third Floor" (Ingster, 1940) and "The Outfit" (Flynn, 1973); an Elisha Cook, Jr. double feature (sort of)

The ineffable Mr. Cook, Jr., does not spend a whole lot of his brief screen time in this exceptionally engaging RKO B-picture looking so chipper. Rather, up until precisely this point, he has been kicking and screaming and kicking and screaming and insisting "I didn't kill anybody!" and kicking and screaming some more. And then, in a lengthy German-Expressionist-inflected dream sequence, he sneers and snickers at the film's hero, who's about to get the chair for the murder that he himself accused Cook's character of, getting a bit of his own back with some "How YOU doin'?" sarcastic insolence. Cook plays a cabbie who's fingered by stolid but apparently insufficiently attentive hero John McGuire (and the character's a reporter, too; damn sloppy journalists...) and is not-quite-cooling his heels in the death house as McGuire's cutie girlfriend is menaced by the real killer and title character, played by Peter Lorre in one of his most seriously weirdly menacing turns. Proudly showing off his seriously bad teeth, indolently draping his long gray scarf around his neck, lunging for our heroine as if in the slow-motion of a smack-induced trance, his work here is part of why this picture is sometimes referred to as "the first true film noir" (and that is the quoted blurb on the back of the Warner Archive box). An arguable claim, for a lot of fairly obvious reasons we needn't get into here. As enjoyable as this picture is, it is not what you'd call an incredibly inspired piece of work. Which is part of what makes it so enjoyable. There is certainly some brilliance here, but also a lot of expedience, and it's the combination of the two that make this a kind of surreal experience. Because it's a B-picture and it's got to get its work done in like an hour and change, its narrative traffics in a kind of ruthless efficiency (to use the wonderful phrase from the Monty Python "Spanish Inquisition" sketch) that creates, among other effects, breakneck, seemingly arbitrary changes in tone, as when the hero's interior monologue begins, 19 minutes into the action. (Said monologue features the immortal reflection, "Lotta people live in Brooklyn. Why couldn't I?") These shifts give the picture as a whole a peculiarly, and I'd say largely uninitentional, alienated surreal feel. Nothing is weirder, however...and I guess this should be classified as a spoiler...than Cook's transformation at the end. The once surly and manic fellow—not that he didn't have a damn good reason to be—has had his name cleared, and his job as a taxi driver (!) reinstated. Waiting outside the diner where the newlywed hero and heroine have said their goodbyes to the neighborhood, he's genuinely eager to show the man who almost had him executed that he doesn't hold anything even resembling a grudge. Offering the couple a ride, he practically screeches, "This one's...ON THE HOUSE!" The pause there indicates that maybe all is not as well as he would like it to look, and that maybe he's gonna drive them all off of a bridge after they get in. We never do find out. 

 

Cook is somewhat more consistently low-key in his even smaller part in John Flynn's 1973 The Outfit, a particular aspect of which was discussed here. Playing the counterman at a rural diner overseen by Joe Don Baker's character, he expresses very Cook-ish suspicion at the two bogus "hunters" who ooze in looking for his boss. Baker makes quick work of the pair (not in the way you might think, though; one of the ways this is such a refreshing film is the resourcefulness shown by its criminal class—part and parcel, of course, of the Richard Stark "Parker" novels, one of which is the source material for this picture). This post-noir picture features a really exemplary group of glorious classic presences in bit and supporting roles: aside from Cook, there's Jane Greer from Out of the Past, Marie Windsor, who did Cook very wrong in The Killing, Robert Ryan, Timothy Carey (also in The Killing, as you'll recall),Henry frigging Jones, and more, and more still. (And Army Archerd as Ryan's butler!) Despite this near-parade of seemingly referential cameos, one never gets the feeling of being winked at, as one often does in the post-Tarantino age of supporting-role stunt/homage casting; all of these pros act like they belong. Because they do.

In any event, a better-than-solid anti-policier, happily replete with scenes and dialogue snatches very well transplanted from the book, and one or two zingers that the filmmakers appear to have come up with themselves. One favorite in the latter category: "Goddamn you, why'd you have to kill him?" "He owed me money."

Tales From the Warner Archives #7: "The Last Flight" (William Dieterle, 1931)

As I myself get older, I bristle at the phrase "old movies" more and more. My first principle that un vrai film est un vrai film allows no room for what some might call ageist hierarchies. I get shirty even when the issue is raised in a relatively innocuous fashion. I remember going on Anderson Cooper's show on CNN back in 2003 to flog Premiere's "Hottest Sex Scenes" feature, and the very gracious Mr. Cooper mentioned, in a genial tone, that the top five pictures on the list were, and I quote, "relatively older movies." Hardly an unreasonable observation—the films in the top five were Blow-Up, Some Like It Hot, ...And God Created Woman, Vixen, and Last Tango In Paris (and this is what you get when you allow the likes of myself to be the sole arbiter and author of such a list, by the way; none of that Indecent Proposal bullshit for me, no sirree). And I gave him a reasoned, reasonable answer. But I remember thinking, with a little bit of hostility, "What do you mean by older, posh boy? You and Blow-Up are pretty much the same age." I'm like that, what can I tell you. 

 

All this is by way of prefacing the statement of fact that The Last Flight, directed by German emigre Dieterle from an adaptation by John Monk Saunders of his novel Single Woman, is what you might call an inescapably old film. As notable and frank and moving as it is, it does creak rather conspicuously at times, and that's life. And if you can get around—or better still, actually appreciate—that, it's a terrifically noteworthy movie experience. 

 

Flight, based in part on Saunder's own experiences (a World War I aviator, he also wrote Wellman's classic Wings, and won an Oscar for his script for The Dawn Patrol), tells the story of a group of damaged American Great War vets galivanting their way through Paris and Spain, fueled by massive amounts of liquor and all pursuing the same expat lovely, the enigmatic Nikki (a lovely Helen Chandler). Yes, the storyline does sound familiar, and yes, there is a bullfighting scene in here...Yes, Saunders' Single Lady would seem to owe a lot to Papa's The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, but what we're likely looking at here are accounts of near-parallel existences, rather than text theft. 

The ringleader of the black-tie sporting group of heartbroken would-be wolves in this picture is Cary, played by silent film superstar Richard Barthelmess, and again he here puts paid to the too-much perpetrated myth that he couldn't carry a talking picture. The acting styles here are pretty much all on the slightly overemphasizing side of the silent mode, but the performances—Cary's pals are played by a group of the era's stars and future stars, names undreamt of in the Twitterific Kidcrits'™ philosophy, including Johnny Mack Brown and David Manners—are all earnest, unforced. 

 

One aspect of the film that's rather bracingly prominent is its treatment of what I believe was not quite yet known as alcoholism. "What should I drink now, I suppose?" is a constant refrain with these characters, and they're all pretty explicit about the fact that they're looking for strong mood uplifters. Nikki is constantly wondering what such and such a cocktail is going to do for her. "It'll make you bark like a fox," Cary advises at one point. "But I don't want to bark like a fox." "It'll make you laugh and play." Yes—laugh and play is what these characters all want to do, and they think the drink is gonna help, and it never, ever does. Looking at one of Cary's crew, miserable in his cups, Nikki asks Cary what's going to finally help the guy get better. "He'll have to be...reborn," Cary says ruefully. It's a striking line, especially so when one puts together that this film was made about five years before the official founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, a recovery group that posits a "spiritual awakening"  as key to a program of sobriety. Kind of in the same ballpark as a rebirth, I'd say. But such an option seems definitively out of most of these characters' reaches, and Nikki and Cary end up together more or less via attrition—all of Cary's comrades go by the wayside, victims of their war trauma and their powerlessness over alcohol. (And Saunders himself took his own life in 1940.)

 

One of those companions, Francis, seen above with the gun, is played by Elliott Nugent, who went on to become a very accomplished and celebrated playwright and director (he helmed the Bob Hope version of The Cat and the Canary, which I get all excited about here). Nugent also went on to have his own harrowing experiences with drinking and depression, which he recounts with admirable courage in his 1965 memoir Events Leading Up To The Comedy. Among the most heartbreaking bits in the account is his telling of the last days of his friend, the great James Thurber (with whom Nugent collaborated on the play The Male Animal), and what Thurber turned into as he "began his daily five-o-clock drinking." "He began to work on a bitter autobiography to be called What Happened To Me. [...] 'This will be the real truth, for the first time,' he told me. 'I can't hide any more behind the mask of comedy that I've used all my life. People are not funny; they are vicious and horrible—and so is life!'"

As for Nugent himself, he ends Events thusly: "I am learning to try to forgive myself, so much as is within my power. Pray for me, dear grandchildren—and for all good people of whatever religion who live in this lovely and often frightening world; God knows we need such petitions."

Tales From the Warner Archives #5: "Mammy" (Curtiz, 1930); or, "Feelin' Grate"

I've bumped this delightful (if I may say so myself) piece up a bit from its original place. Because writing about movies really is more important.

That corner of my sensibility that I sometimes refer to as "my weird Al Jolson thing?" It all began with Aaron. I'd known him slightly since grade school, a blustery, larger-than-life fellow who was a fan/scholar of vintage musicals of all sorts—he was the kid who once borrowed the key to my house so he could play hooky and go over there and watch Rose Of Washington Square on the box (both my parents worked days). Not merely an Al Jolson nut, he was a fantastic Jolson impersonator, and his greatest triumph in a high-school theatrical career full of triumphs (including a raucous turn as Luther Billis in Dumont High's production of South Pacific) was the Jolson act he did at S.O. (for "Student Organization") Night in early February of '74. Singing "Mammy," "Rock-a-bye Your Baby," and "California, Here I Come..." in a period suit, white gloves, string tie...and full blackface. Not only did nobody care about the blackface (Dumont was a pretty lily-white town, and in the '74 high school yearbook I only count a total of three African-American students; as for teachers, forget about it), but Aaron completely brought down the house. He was just the third performer of the first act, but he pretty much defined the show. Not even the spectacle of Aaron's younger brother in drag, with Larry Golden and Mark Zecca similarly arrayed, doing the Andrews Sisters doing "Rum and Coca-Cola," could touch Aaron's white socks.

As some American high-schoolers may be aware, it's tough when you peak in your junior year. Which is, effectively, what Aaron had done. As my friend Joseph Failla recalled in a recent conversation, "After 'S.O. Night' there was no where else to go, right away, so Aaron just kept preaching the Jolie gospel to whoever would listen."

Hence, bugging the Dumont Public Library into letting him introduce at least one screening of a Jolson picture. Which is how I first saw Mammy. A film I found very befuddling, and continued to be befuddled by for many years.

Tales from the Warner Archives #2: "My Blood Runs Cold" (Conrad, 1968)

In the midst of working on what my man Jack Torrance would refer to as "a new writing project," I come upon a road block which I decide would be best transcended via distraction. A 1965 serial-killer thriller with a supernatural edge starring Troy Donohue and Joey Heatherton and directed by William Conrad would appear to be just the thing.

But My Blood Runs Cold turns out to be quite a bit, well, tonier than its particulars would make it appear. Granted, its opening minutes—a 19th-century flashback that Conrad places a scrim of optically-printed parchment behind—is on the goofily faux-refined side, and who does that plummy but gruff voice reciting poetry belong to...

...but our own auteur himself. (Personal note: Ever since watching Bride of Frankenstein together years ago, My Lovely Wife and I only ever refer to the above Romantic poet as "George Gordon, Lord Byron!", exclamation point included.) And the sight of Joey Heatherton in period dress does give one a real who-knows-what-to-expect presentiment. 

But the picture rather quickly settles in to a mode of contemporary melodrama not that far removed from the work Donahue did with Delmer Daves just years earlier, and then-sex-kitten Heatherton is, to my eye, a more creditable performer than Connie Stevens. I know, I know—you're gonna have to see it to believe it. Heatherton plays a standard-issue self-destructive young heiress who meets "drifter" Donahue (who really puts on his best Rock Hudson voice here) after knocking him off his motorcycle in a road accident. Donahue's character calls himself Ben, insists on calling Heatherton's Julie "Barbara," and has an interesting story about how the two were lovers a century ago. Julie's dad, a ruthless businessman played by Barry Sullivan, doesn't like it, and neither does Julie's basically-okay-but-sort-of-spineless paramour Harry (Nicolas Coster). Julie's aunt (Jeanette Nolan in faux Agnes Moorehead mode), on the other hand, is intrigued, particularly because this stranger has all of the facts about a generations-ago family romance dead on. 

Conrad refuses to overplay the supernatural hoo-ha aspect of the scenario (the screenplay is by John Mantley, from a story by John Meredyth Lucas) and hones in on the poor-little-rich-girl domestic dramatics in a fashion that's both fluid and slightly, slyly, self-conscious. "Father, please, you sound like something out of East Lynne," Heatherton's character protests at one point. Even when one very real corpse turns up, Conrad's perspective is one of near-disinterest. One might expect such an approach to yield the cinematic equivalent of lukewarm water, but instead one is kept pleasingly off-balance, at least up until the sadly inevitable "he's-both-a-delinquent-AND-misunderstood" plot reveal/climax. 

Which is not to say that the picture entirely lacks in the lurid perversity department, where I was expecting it to deliver most. There's one scene in which Heatherton, doing some restoration work on a family beach house, turns on the radio and starts doing an entirely unmotivated dance number to some fake Jobim/Gilberto grooves. Conrad, who by his friend Anthony Burgess' account was as much an ass-chaser as he was a Shakespearean, begins the sequence thusly:

Then Joey really gets into it: 

...Endust, take me away!

Donahue's impassive reaction shot (he's snuck in and is watching) is a real keeper:

No, don't get too excited there, fella. 

Thoroughly minor stuff, to be sure, but entirely worthwhile for genre fiends, Bill Conrad boosters, and doubters of Joey Heatherton's acting chops. You WILL believe!

Tales from the Warner Archives #1: "Bye Bye Braverman" (Lumet, 1968)

"It should have been a soufflé, but it turned out a pancake." So director Sidney Lumet described his 1968 film Bye Bye Braverman in his entertaining book Making Movies. Andrew Sarris, describing the film in his book The American Cinema, is a bit kinder, citing "marvelous" and "affecting" work by some of its cast; still, Sarris says, the picture is "as courageous in its conception as it is vulgar in its execution."

What's so courageous about it's conception, you may ask. And I'll then ask you: how many studio pictures do you know of concerning the mid-life crises of a small group of New York Jewish intellectuals? So there. And this one's plot—in which the aforementioned fellows convene for the funeral of an old pal—seems to take its cue from the "Hades" section of Joyce's Ulysses. At least that's what Stanley Edgar Hyman said of the Wallace Markfield novel upon which the Herb Sargent script is based. (Markfield himself: "I can't say that Joyce is important to me. But what writer has not been influenced by Joyce?") Again, pretty highbrow for a Hollywood picture. Then again, the town was opening up at that time. 

Given its milieu and the fact that Lumet is one of the most indefatigable cinematic chroniclers of NYC, the movie maintains a very distinct curiosity value, one which can now be satisfied via its DVD release from the Warner Archive. After checking it out for the first time in decades—I think the first and last time I saw it was in a truncated version on WABC's "The 4:30 Movie" or some such program—I somewhat regret having to report that Lumet's a pretty good judge of his own work. Braverman has its moments—quite a few of them, in fact—but on the whole it's a bit of a botch.