Pre-Code Parade: DIPLOMANIACS (1933)

Ever since I read Harry Jenkins' What Made Pistachio Nuts?, a critical account of the rise and fall of vaudeville-inspired "nut" comedy in the early sound era, I've wanted to see Diplomaniacs, a Wheeler and Woolsey vehicle Jenkins treated as an exemplar of the subgenre's disregard for conventional narrative. What mattered most was not narrative coherence or traditional appeals to morals or emotions, Jenkins wrote, but giving the star performers opportunities to do their distinctive thing. In time nut comedy was supplanted by screwball comedy and other "classical" subgenres that offered audiences a more comfortable immersion in cinematic fantasy worlds, but for a time the novelty of funny voices and a certain sense of cynical absurdity in the face of the Depression made comics like Wheeler and Woolsey popular. Their films were personal showcases, but in retrospect, their fame having long since faded compared to the Marx Bros., the pair seem more like cogs in comic machines, consistent with what's struck me as a tendency of their home studio, RKO, to reduce comic actors to human cartoons. Diplomaniacs is an especially infernal machine, directed by William A. Seiter but effectively devised by co-writer Joseph L. Manckiewicz, who trod similar pseudo-political territory the previous year with Paramount's Million Dollar Legs. In other words, Diplomaniacs is in the same neighborhood as Duck Soup, and shares some cast members, but Jenkins warns us against thinking of any of these films primarily as political satires. Politics, he argues, only provided a setting appropriate for the antics of the nut comics. Films like these are anti-war only insofar as they're anti-everything.

The film opens on a note of initially questionable relevance, informing us that American Indians don't grow facial hair, as demonstrated by one specimen showing us his left and right profile. This isn't as surreal as it looks, since it leads to our discovery that Wheeler and Woolsey, or whatever they're calling themselves this time, are running a barber shop on an Oklahoma reservation. Here's a real history lesson for you: the boys are flopping because the barber business back then depended on people coming in regularly to be shaved instead of showing up periodically for a trim. Despite this miscalculation, the oil-rich tribe finds a use for the barbers. Hearing them pontificate on foreign affairs (one of the film's few coherent editorial points is that many nations are deadbeats when it comes to debts they owe the U.S.), the Oxford-educated chief who enters in a limo and is almost too erudite for our heroes to comprehend commissions them to represent his nation at the latest round of Geneva peace talks. Given the generous expense account that comes with the work, the Indians expect results. Should the neophyte diplomats (later explicitly identified in the press as "diplomaniacs") fail to negotiate a favorable settlement, including a permanent anti-war pledge, the chief will turn them into gorillas. Is this typical native witch-doctoring? Since the chief keeps a caged ape he claims was once the most beautiful woman in Paris, it's best for the boys not to take chances.

Recognizing the Oopa-Doop tribe's intervention in international affairs as a potential game-changer like the emergence of Wakanda, powerful arms manufacturer Winklereid (Louis Calhern, Groucho's antagonist in Duck Soup) and his Chinaman-for-hire (Hugh Herbert) scheme to sabotage the Indian mission. Naturally, what you do in such a situation is order up a vamp. Amazon today has nothing on the technology of Diplomaniacs; no sooner has Chow Chow called in the order than the vamp, wrapped in plastic, arrives through a delivery chute. Regrettably, the script doesn't follow up on the possibility that Dolores (Marjorie White) is some kind of robot, but I suppose it's funnier to imagine a real person getting dispatched to her new job in that fashion. Recognizing later that there are two men to vamp, Winklereid and his entourage visit the Dead Rat cafe to recruit uber-seductress Fifi (Phyllis Barry), whose kisses can set people on fire internally and make dangerous projectiles when blown at you. You see, Wheeler and Woolsey usually get love interests in their pictures, and here they are, only marginally more dedicated to their malevolent tasks than the Marxes were when they were hired as hitmen in Monkey Business.

That's about enough set-up. From this point the film is pretty much a sequence of set pieces climaxing when our heroes finally arrive, in appropriate Alpine gear, at the Geneva conference where Edgar Kennedy (Chico and Harpo's antagonist from Duck Soup) presides in two-fisted fashion. There's no time for slow burns in this picture; Kennedy goes from zero to machine gun in career-best time here. During an acrobatic performance the diplomaniacs argue incoherently in favor of an anti-war resolution while Winklereid, taking no chances, throws a classic cartoon bomb into the conference room. The resulting sooty explosion transforms the representatives of many nations into African-Americans, down to the fat white lips shown by such typical specimens of the race as Al Jolson and Eddy Cantor. More than six months before Duck Soup, we get a spiritually-inflected musical number affirming that "All God's Chillun Want Peace." Later, the bomb having failed, Winklereid and his fellow conspirators consider killing the imminently successful diplomaniacs with an experimental explosive bullet, but succeed only in vaporizing themselves, leaving only their clothes to float where they were left. Fortunately, Winklereid's fallback plan of planting a forged treaty on the boys succeeds beyond expectations. Once the fake news is exposed, the film ends with the world at war, Wheeler and Woolsey drafted into the U.S. army (perhaps for gorilla warfare?) and the bad guys looking down with approval from a heavenly cloud.

Damn! Diplomaniacs really does outdo Jenkins' description.It's a comedy of absolute ruthlessness with no pretense of likability unless you, like some girl in each film in the series, find Bert Wheeler strangely cute. Its almost ideological absurdity is highlighted by Hugh Herbert's performance as Chow Chow, the whole point of which is the absurdity of the casting. Chow Chow kvetches at Winklereid from the moment of his arrival, lapses into odd ethnic accents, experiences a flashback of his mother when meeting the notorious Fifi, comments that white vamps, compared to those of other colors, get dirty more easily, and utters proverbs such as "Sex of one, half dozen of another." In the picture's most flamboyant act of narrative vandalism, Chow Chow quits his role as Winklereid's henchman in mid-picture, climbing down from a tree branch and starting home from Paris to China. Shortly afterward, we find him sailing homeward, passing a floating signpost laden with advertising. A few minutes later, we cut back to him arriving in China, where Mrs. Chow Chow berates him for arriving five years late for dinner. During that time she acquired several small children because, as she explains, she wanted to surprise him.  Digressions like this one make Diplomaniacs look more stylistically up-to-date than it might have been when Jenkins was writing his books. People who watch it should find it very reminiscent, if not pre-miniscent, of today's absurdist prime-time cartoons, and its overall everything's-a-joke attitude can be found all over the place in our time, sometimes to an unpleasant degree. As a Wheeler and Woolsey vehicle it's whatever; those two haven't stood the test of time in cultural consciousness because they never really developed, either verbally or visually, personae as readily recognized and embraced as those of the Marxes. But as a comedy picture Diplomaniacs is a belligerent blitzkrieg that may be more simply stunning than purely funny but is nevertheless an amazing hour to sit through if you get the chance.

Pre-Code Parade: THE EAGLE AND THE HAWK (1933)

It may have been impossible not to romanticize World War I in the air, but John Monk Saunders did his damndest. He was the go-to-guy for air war pictures, whether original screenplays or adaptions of his prose stories, and his popularity in that role tells you something about what people thought of the Great War not so long after its end. Stuart Walker's Eagle and the Hawk is an adaptation in which Saunders himself, as far as I know, didn't participate, but inevitably his dark tone shadows the picture, and in hindsight the picture foreshadows his dark destiny. This may be the darkest of all Saunders' stories, following three American pilots, only two of whom will survive the picture. Walker uses admirable pictorial shorthand to establish the characters, using the actors' title cards to illustrate their social class. Jerry Young (Frederic March) is one of the idle rich, shown playing polo. Henry Crocker (Cary Grant) is shown supervising some construction project, which defines him as a worker and a more practical sort than Young. Mike Richards (Jack Oakie) has no obvious occupation; his characteristic moment is getting a coin-op fortune, predicting great danger, as he exits a restaurant. And sure enough, we dissolve to "Slug" in France, where he's become Jerry's best buddy. Jerry and Crocker don't get along at all. Crocker isn't a very good pilot and nearly gets both men killed when their plane ends upside down on the landing field. Crocker is relegated to the status of "observer," which means that he mans the machine gun, standing upright in the open in the rear of a two-seat plane. While he resents the seeming demotion, the work suits his ruthless attitude toward war. He commits the sort of atrocities the Germans were accused of, mowing down a helpless Hun who's bailed out of an observation balloon (in some of the footage this film borrows from Wings). That's tantamount to murder as far as Jerry's concerned, but to Crocker the point of war is to wipe out the enemy as soon as possible. Unfortunately, Jerry isn't seeing the point of the war they way he used to. Losing five observers in a matter of weeks will do that to you. And Crocker getting Slug Richards killed because he wanted to stay in the air to kill more Germans won't help, either. The breaking point comes when Jerry goes up with a rookie observer making his first flight. Of course the kid gets shot -- some rookies didn't even make it into the air because the Germans bombed their headquarters -- and of course the poor wretch plunges from the plane to a still more horrific finish when Jerry loops the loop to evade German pursuit. But the very last straw comes when Jerry actually brings down the German, learns that it's one of the top enemy aces, but only sees the face of a youth hardly older than the doomed kid who went up with him. And for that Jerry gets another medal! For that he's the toast of the base yet again, but he answers their toasts with a drunken tirade against war. Initially contemptuous, Crocker grows more concerned as he sees Jerry crack. But there's nothing he can do -- nothing to save Jerry's sanity or life, that is. Yet there's one thing he can do to save his frenemy's reputation, although that hardly matters to Jerry himself by the end.

This is a war film that ends with the hero killing himself, though technically the denouement comes when Crocker takes the corpse up for the last flight so he can blast its skull with machine-gun fire to make it appear, for whoever might care at the base or back home, that Jerry died nobly in combat. I guess that makes it a Pre-Code war film, though there are other touches that date it that way, like Slug teaching a French waitress English using A Night in a Turkish Harem as a textbook. Speaking of Jack Oakie, you've got to admire a film that slaughters its comedy-relief character, and you've got to admire Oakie for really being more of a character actor here, as he would be later in The Texas Rangers (where he also dies) and Call of the Wild. He may have been the only Thirties comic able to pull that sort of trick off. Meanwhile, its a bracing surprise to see Cary Grant, still just an up-and-comer here, playing a bloodthirsty asshole, though ultimately he's just a straight man for Frederic March's manic-depressive pyrotechnics. I like the way the screenwriters actually didn't stress the class differences among the characters illustrated in the credits, allowing you to speculate subtextually on how Jerry and Crocker's different social status may have contributed to their conflicts without forcing an explanation on you. The three lead actors in this nearly all-male picture -- Carole Lombard shows up for one scene as "The Beautiful Lady" -- bounce off each other to nice effect throughout, and their performances probably made Eagle and the Hawk worthwhile for audiences otherwise put off by its war-is-miserable message. As for John Monk Saunders, Code Enforcement led to tamer films like West Point of the Air, and before he could have his say on the next war, he hung himself.

Pre-Code Parade: THE NARROW CORNER (1933)

One of the things insisted on most vehemently in the period of Code Enforcement, from 1934 through the mid-1960s, was that movie characters couldn't get away with crimes, especially killing. Something like The Narrow Corner, despite its literary credentials as a W. Somerset Maugham novel, probably couldn't be made as a movie a year or two after Alfred E. Green's film came out. The hero (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) is clearly a fugitive as the film begins, though we don't find out why he's on the run until later in the picture. An American (or English) fugitive in exotic exile was a popular motif at this time; the idea combines the appealing prospect of starting over with the persistence of threat if not outright guilt for whatever you've done. This time there's the added terror of repeating your original mistake. Fred Blake, it turns out, killed a man back home. Green illustrates this awkwardly, in a manner presumably inspired by the Rouben Mamoulian Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, using a split screen to show both Fred telling the story and the story itself in flashback. Showing Fred talking really adds nothing to the sequence, which is highlighted by the faceless shot of a woman's hand putting a gun in Fred's hand as he grapples for life with her husband. This matters because Fred is falling in love again with another man's woman. The man is Ralph Bellamy in something like his eventual archetypal role as the loser boyfriend, the guy who gets dumped in favor of the more charismatic star. But this was still a time when Bellamy could win the girl in some of his pictures, and even when he doesn't you're in for a fight if you try to take his woman. In Narrow Corner he sort of wins but definitely loses, choking out Fairbanks in a fit of jealous rage but horrified immediately by what he's done. "I killed him," he moans in exactly the tone of voice you associate with those guilt-stricken, stupid predators who think they've done in Bugs Bunny, but before Junior can pop up and kiss him the inconsolable lug goes and kills himself. Bellamy dies, dead, as Old Ygor might explain it, Junior dies, live! The way is now clear for Fred Blake to get the girl, and as long as he can steer a boat through some treacherous reefs he and she can start over, presumably without worries over the man he did kill or the man for whose death he bears at least a little responsibility. Not that I object morally, mind you, but a lot of people in 1933 did seem to object to such seemingly triumphant immorality. For me it was just in keeping with the admirable seediness of the whole project, and it's preferable to some stories I've seen where the big twist is that the hero (or heroine) didn't actually kill anyone back home. Fairbanks, Bellamy and female lead Patricia Ellis are surrounded by a strong cast of grotesques, from alcoholic sea captains and opium-addicted doctors to cantankerous old codgers boasting of their ancient conquests in the islands. The show is purely studio and soundstage bound but the special effects for the story's dangerous sea voyages are, if modest, at least dramatically effective also. Narrow Corner is another entertaining Pre-Code star vehicle for Fairbanks Jr., for whom the period meant freedom, above all, from having to be his father's son on film. He showed a range in these few years at Warner Bros. that, his other virtues notwithstanding, he would never show again.

Pre-Code Parade: FAST WORKERS (1933)

From 1930 through 1933 it seemed that every John Gilbert film promised a "new" Gilbert. What this means was nothing was working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's erstwhile romantic idol, whose lack of an effectively cinematic speaking voice was already a matter of legend. Fast Workers had an air of doom about it because the fan press had already made it known that it was Gilbert's last film for Metro -- though he'd be called back later that year at Greta Garbo's request to co-star in Queen Christina. This latest attempt to craft a "new" Gilbert was really like many of the others. The object was to make him seem more virile, as it had been when he played a seaman in Way For a Sailor and a gangster in Gentleman's Fate. The specific idea this time was to make him one of the working class, a riveter helping build skyscrapers and the sort of lout who'd have Robert "Carl Denham" Armstrong as his best pal. If this seemed an unlikely role for Gilbert, given his silent typing as a period romantic, it seems a still more unlikely film to be directed by Tod Browning, at least until a plot asserts itself. What's the director of Dracula and Freaks doing here? If it wasn't a punishment project, the idea probably was that, back in Lon Chaney's heyday, Browning specialized in stories in which jealousy drove men to diabolical extremes. A skyscraper under construction offers plenty of diabolical opportunities, but until it sort of becomes a Browning film Fast Workers is a knuckleheaded misogynist comedy whose title is a double entendre. The riveters work fast, or so they boast, with the ladies as well as the rivets.

The plot is a triangle pitting Gunner Smith (Gilbert) and Bucker Reilly (Armstrong) against each other and gold-digging Mary (Mae Clarke). The comic angle is that Bucker -- you can easily imagine him having a different but rhyming name, and that's probably no accident -- is one of these would-be wise guys who claims to know all about women, only to be whipped by one. He regales his pals on the girders by pantomiming how he'd treat a gold-digger, punting her down the stairs, through the halls and out the door. He and Gunner are eligible prey for gold-diggers because riveters make good money by Depression standards. Gunner, arrested for fighting, can pay a $10 fine without batting an eye. But when he gets too flippant within the judge's hearing the fine is jacked up to fifty bucks, and he can't cover that with his cash in pocket. Who should he call for the extra money but Mary, an acquaintance of his, and who should she have in her room but Bucker, who has just boasted to her that he'd figured out her schemes, only to have her turn the tables? He'd anticipated the sort of sob stories a gold-digger might tell, but she catches him flat-footed by asking tearfully how he knew about the spot she was in. Now comes an emergency call for urgently-needed money, which a conscience-stricken Bucker readily provides. Before long he wants to marry the girl.

Strangely, the avowed cynic Gunner grows jealous. He finally arranges for Bucker to see photographic proof that Mary had been cheating on her with him, and now our poor sap gets a murderous look in his eye. Armstrong seems to devolve before our eyes, somehow growing more stupid looking by the second until he stalks off in a slack-jawed, glassy-eyed passion. This is Tod Browning territory now, only Chaney never had a chance to drop someone off a skyscraper like Armstrong has. The mere shifting of a plank means that Gunner will fall to his doom, but at the last moment Bucker impulsively reaches out to catch his pal. In a scene that echoes through movie history from Saboteur to The Hudsucker Proxy, Gunner clings to the sleeve of Bucker's sweatshirt, which is rapidly coming undone. I guess he should have gotten the double-stitch. Still, he manages to save Gunner by helping him swing out enough so that he lands on a scaffold only a few stories below. The final reconciliation comes in the hospital as a repentant Bucker sends an unrepentant Mary away for good, only to appear instantly smitten with Gunner's nurse, leaving his bedridden buddy to lament that all his broken bones have gone for nothing.

Armstrong's moronic turn as Bucker reminds you of how exceptional his performance as the masterfully desperate Carl Denham was, and his coarseness could only remind audiences of how out-of-place Gilbert seemed in his milieu. If anything, Gilbert's problem here is that he speaks too well; his voice is too clipped and refined for his role in the lack of any backstory explaining a social scion's fall from grace. Despite that handicap, as the film darkens a funny thing happens: Gilbert gets better. No, he doesn't suddenly acquire a working-class voice. What he acquires is real emotion. You hear it in small moments like when he roars in anger at being lowered to ground level only to have to dodge a truck. As he broods over his jealousy during an extended sequence in Atlantic City, Gilbert does some of his best acting in talkies. He does a lot with little, mutely and drunkenly keeping time on a bass drum with the house band, the monotonous beat signalling the buildup to an explosion. Looking at one of his better sound films, The Phantom of Paris, I wondered whether Gilbert needed more arrogant, domineering roles. What he needed even more was passion, and Fast Workers shows that that passion could just as easily and effectively take the form of jealous rage, which he conveys far more convincingly and far less cartoonishly than Armstrong does. The sad part was that I started wondering whether Gilbert was drunk in his best scenes. But I know better to say that he should have worked drunk, because I've seen his miserable last film, The Captain Hates the Sea, where he seems to have been drunk much of the time,and I know that drink killed him soon afterward. Just maybe Browning got something out of Gilbert that none of his other talkie directors managed to elicit. Fast Workers is not a good movie, and must have been a step down from Gilbert's most acclaimed performance in Downstairs, the film he co-wrote (coming soon to the Pre-Code Parade!) but just as it may have justified Metro cutting him, it also proved that Gilbert still had something that he probably had all along, if only the studio knew how, or really wanted to use it.

Pre-Code Parade: ANN CARVER'S PROFESSION (1933)

Fay Wray was the first and remains the greatest of Hollywood's scream queens. History has typed her as a damsel in distress, but this Columbia release proves that Wray's mighty vocal instrument could also be used as a weapon in a portrayal of a woman of power. Her Ann Carver works her way through law school as a short-order cook, while her boyfriend Lightning Bill Graham (Gene Raymond) is the campus football hero. She earns her law degree and passes the bar exam but appears satisfied with the life of a housewife while hubby struggles to bring home the bacon as an architect. His prospects for advancement are limited, and Bill limits them further by refusing an offer from his pal, now a niteclub owner -- to make more money as a singer. Perhaps clinging to an old code of amateurism -- he's a man of old codes -- Bill refuses to exploit his athletic celebrity to earn a living. Meanwhile, at a dinner party, Ann eavesdrops on a conversation about a high-profile legal case. It becomes clear that she's been following the story and her opinions are surprisingly expert and critical of the defendant's legal team, the leader of which is present at the party. Rather than offended, the old attorney is impressed, hiring Ann to take his place when illness keeps him out of court.

This case is dynamite. A young man of good family is being sued for breach of promise by a light-skinned "colored" woman (Diane Bori in her second and apparently last film performance, despite living until 2004, the same year Fay Wray died). He dropped her when he realized she was colored, but it's her contention that he knew she was colored all along, and it's the contention of her lawyer (Robert Barrat, straying off the Warner Bros. reservation) that "only a blithering idiot" would not have realized from the start that the plaintiff was colored -- he has her bare her shoulder in the witness box to illustrate the point. Unquestioned here is the implicit assumption that it would be OK for the defendant to dump the plaintiff if she had, in fact, deceived him about her race.

Ann declines to cross-examine the plaintiff, and asks for a recess when Barrat closes the case for his client. She returns to call Barrat as her only witness. Her first question to him is, "Are you a blithering idiot?" It's a highly irregular question, but Ann wants to prove a point. She does this by bringing six women into the courtroom. All have a similar complexion, but Ann announces that three of them are white, while three are black. Can Barrat tell white from black? His contention was that the average man should be able to tell, but while the judge spares him from answering, it's clear that he's flummoxed. All this testimony, and the six women, now stripped to their bathing suits, are thrown out, but Ann has introduced the necessary degree of doubt in jurors' minds to win the case for the defendant. We the audience are left to understand that the defendant honestly mistook the plaintiff for a white girl and was justified in dumping her once he realized his error. Does that make the film racist? Only insofar as it reflects the legal precedents prevailing in a more racist society than our own, and in any event the race angle is quickly eclipsed by the movie's sexual politics.

The newspapers report that a legal star is born, and Ann quickly becomes a full partner in the firm. She proves superhumanly versatile, masterful both in the "circus" tactics of the criminal courtroom and the subtleties of corporate law. Meanwhile, Bill continues to grind away at his architect job, increasingly self-conscious of who actually brings in the big bucks in the family. The last straw for him is when he lacks the cash on hand to pay the household servants, Ann having forgotten to write a check before heading to Washington to negotiate some big business deal. He can still make more money at his pal's niteclub -- the pal has an annoyingly "humorous" habit of cutting words off at the final syllab -- and now he decides to do so. If Ann's success has humiliated (not to mention emasculated) Bill, his plunge into show business humiliates her. She travels in elite company now, and having her husband sing for his supper on the strength of his athletic fame -- it sure isn't on the strength of Gene Raymond's singing; he stinks -- undermines her social standing. Ann Carver's Profession is often condemned as a sexist film, and it definitely is that, but Ann's classism arguably counterbalances Bill's sexism. Her contempt for his crooning is compounded by gossip linking him to the niteclub's female star, Carole Rodgers (Claire Dodd). Carole's "the hottest white girl in town," according to the niteclub's black ladies' room attendant, "She takes them there and brings 'em back alive." It doesn't help that Carole is aggressively pursuing Bill. Dragged to the niteclub by her new social set, Ann seethes as Carole plants one on Bill just offstage, but doesn't hear Bill tell Carole, "Never do that again!" While he sings his lousy number, Ann contemptuously throws coins at his feet and storms out.

The apparent end of Bill's marriage emboldens Carole, who attempts a drunken seduction of her co-star. Getting the cold shoulder, Carole manages to pass out on Bill's bed, crack her head on the metal bedpost, and strangle herself when her necklace gets caught on the post while she slides off the bed. It's hard to believe on screen, and in the movie itself Bill gets arrested for murdering Carole. Guess who represents him in court, whether Bill likes it or not? At this point, Ann Carver becomes a distaff Free Soul with Fay Wray in the Lionel Barrymore role as the defense attorney with a dysfunctional family. In A Free Soul, Barrymore defends his daughter's boyfriend by denouncing himself for having brought his girl up wrong so that she got in trouble with a gangster, which led to the boyfriend killing the gangster. Likewise, Ann Carver defends her husband by blaming herself -- referring to herself in the third person throughout and having first argued very persuasively that the prosecution has failed to prove either deed or motive -- for ruining poor hubby's life by having a career of her own. Barrymore's aria climaxes with the old man dropping dead in the courtroom; it's enough for Wray to have her character commit career suicide. "I have tried my last case," Ann declares, as Raymond beams with adoration.

The film's ending insults the intelligence not just because it accepts the necessity of Ann's retirement, but because somehow -- somehow in the way exposure to nuclear radiation somehow gives people super powers -- Bill now becomes a successful architect so they can live on his earnings after all. You hope against hope that we'll learn that Ann is acting as his legal counsel, since that seems like the only way he could get ahead -- but forget it; her destiny is to bear Bill's brats. She admires his design for their new home because it lets in sun and air; he answers that he's thinking of just that: a son and heir. Ha ha ha. The worst part of it all is that Wray's superwoman must surrender her career, and the world must do without a powerful legal mind, all for the sake of an utter loser. Gene Raymond is the blonde booby of Pre-Code cinema; the man makes George Brent come across like Gable. He does next to nothing in the picture besides pity himself and sing poorly. I can't help but think -- I guess I'd like to think, that even in 1933 audiences recognized that Bill was unworthy and undeserving of Ann, especially when Fay Wray is giving what probably is her greatest acting performance. Not most iconic, obviously, but greatest. She's as persuasive as an omnicompetent legal whiz as Ann is in the courtroom and boardroom. Weaponizing her verbal pyrotechnics, she blasts formidable character actors like Barrat off the screen and makes Raymond look even more like nothing than he normally does. The film itself concedes the point, given the evidence of Raymond, that men are the weaker sex, but it also argues, against all reason given the evidence of Wray, that women must sacrifice their ambitions and talents to take care of these big babies. It all makes you want to scream....

DVR Diary: SCARLET RIVER (1933)

Tom Keene was RKO's cowboy star during the Pre-Code era. He made some A pictures but quickly settled into B stardom before sinking further gradually, from RKO to Monogram by the 1940s. For some reason he changed his stage name to Richard Powers later that decade. He used that name steadily to the end of his career, but one fan of Thirties cowboys saw value in the name abandoned by the man born George Duryea. Such fame as Keene has today is owed to his employment by Ed Wood, first in a failed TV pilot, The Crossroads Avenger, and later in Plan 9 From Outer Space, in which he and Gregory Wolcott have an epic confrontation with Eros the alien. Yet here's Tom Keene in Otto Brower's Scarlet River hobnobbing with Myrna Loy, Bruce Cabot and other studio players in an RKO commissary. This is more a movie-movie than a true western, with Keene playing a thinly disguised version of himself, or his star self: a cowboy actor named Tom. The modern world's encroaching on the old west and director Edgar Kennedy is having a hard time finding pristine locations for his latest horse opera. This is illustrated in the trick opening, the dialogue of a pioneer couple, Keene as the husband, interrupted by a honking automobile. Another location is disrupted by cross-country runners. Aren't the Los Angeles Olympics over by now? the crew wonders. Finally a ranch is found far from the cares and snares of 1933, but there's a serpent in this eden -- a foreman who at one moment courts the pretty young owner, whose younger brother idolizes him, and in the next schemes with a crook to defraud her out of the ranch. He squares these contradictory tactics in his mind by taking for granted that the girl will marry him. This is Creighton Chaney in his fifth movie role as an adult, two years before he dares claim the mantle, or at least the name, of his much-mourned father. Creighton is 27 years old, his frame and his voice less husky than we know them, but you still know his character doesn't stand a chance with the girl, if only because this is a Tom Keene picture. It's not as if Keene is a matinee idol -- far from it, it seems to me -- but young Chaney is still very green. He can't really project either charisma or menace, so the foreman ends up a subordinate villain, his conflicted motives leading him to confront and get killed by the principal heavy when that scoundrel threatens the heroine. Earlier in the picture, Creighton is the butt of the film's great joke. Usually when westerns send up Hollywood they hypocritically make Hollywood the other, the hero becoming an authentic westerner who shows up the dude actor. In Scarlet River the gag is that Tom the cowboy actor both talks the talk and walks the walk, showing up the real cowboys. He's a better cowboy than Creighton the full-time rancher. In one scene Tom's wandered away from the set and director Kennedy challenges Chaney to do the classic taking-control-of-the-runaway-stagecoach stunt. Proud Creighton, already jealous of the girl's attention to the star, assumes himself capable, but ends up having to take the classic Yakima Canutt dive between the rows of horses to escape trampling. More accurately, I guess, Canutt himself takes the dive, as he does when Tom reappears to prove his superiority by "doing his own stunt." Canutt's an invisible man, however -- though he has a bit role in his own right -- while the kiddies were supposed to believe in Keene's own miraculous skills. You're left wondering how seriously the film takes itself, especially when Tom plays the moral-exemplar film to the hilt. Chronologically this picture should be part of the Pre-Code Parade, but it's a movie in which Tom Keene spanks a teenage boy for smoking cigarettes. So Scarlet River is working its own trail while the parade passes by, and the director is happy as long as no one marches in front of his camera. Historically this is one of those historical-footnote pictures in a trivial way. It's not quite on the level of Clark Gable playing the heavy in a William Boyd movie, but Lon Chaney Jr. definitely looms much larger in the collective moviegoing consciousness than Tom Keene does, and the retroactive disproportion of their roles gives Scarlet River a slight psychotronic pathos, as does our knowledge of their respective fates. Plan 9 is one thing, Dracula vs. Frankenstein another. Who did fare better in the end?

Pre-Code Parade: BLONDIE JOHNSON (1933)

As one of Warner Bros.' top gold diggers, Joan Blondell was already a gangster of love. It was a natural leap for screenwriter Earl Baldwin and director Ray Enright to make her a plain and simple gangster, a distaff counterpart to Cagney, Robinson et al. Inevitably, however, Virginia "Blondie" Johnson remains a more sympathetic figure than the studio's male gangsters. She is explained, as they are not, by a grudge against society, introduced begging for an immediate relief payment after her family is evicted from their latest home. Her mom's dying of pneumonia in the back room of a pharmacy offered to the Johnsons as shelter, but the fact that they have a roof over their heads makes them better off than many families in the eyes of the relief agency, and in any event they can't pay out on the spot. Blondie returns home to find Mom dead. She rejects the consolation of faith, realizing now that there are two ways to get ahead: the hard way and the easy way.

For Blondie the easy way is to turn grifter -- and you thought she meant something else! She runs a con with a taxi driver, standing at street corners crying that she won't get to work on time and will lose her job, hoping that some mark will spring for cab fare when her partner (Sterling Holloway) drives past. This works for a while, but Blondie learns that you can't con a con when one of her marks reveals himself as Danny Jones (Chester Morris), the right-hand man of Max Wagner. Max and Danny are in the "insurance" business; they insure shopkeepers against getting their property wrecked and so forth, if you get my drift. Danny gets his money back, but he admires Blondie's spunk. She helps his buddy Louie (Allen Jenkins) beat a murder rap by playing his pregnant lover before a gullible, soft-hearted jury, and runs a number of cons on the side with the help of her fellow molls. She also detects a lack of ambition in Danny and goads him to challenge Max for dominance. When that gets Danny run over and hospitalized, Louie takes out Max. He may seem simple, being Allen Jenkins and all, but he lives like a serial villain. His apartment is furnished with a fireplace that turns into a bar at the flip of a switch -- and the space behind the wall makes an excellent machine-gun nest. Louis invites Max and his loyalists over for a parlay, steps out for a moment, and in the next moment Max & Co. are dead.

Danny takes over and starts living large, devoting much of his time to another woman as Blondie grows jealous and ambitious in her own right. She thinks Danny's spending too much of the gang's money on the other woman and convinces Louis and the rest of their cronies to back her in a bloodless coup. Now it's her name on the door of their impressive front office while Danny loses his money and his new girl. When Louie suddenly gets arrested for Max's murder and gossip indicates that the D.A. has a witness against him, everyone assumes it's the disgruntled Danny. This is the supreme moment for Blondie; as the gang leader she knows what she has to do though it makes her sick at heart. "What are you waiting for?" she tells her men, condemning Danny to death. But bare minutes later her spy in the D.A.'s office tells her that the witness is the janitor of Louie's apartment building, whom we saw chatting with Louie moments before Max's death. Now she has to rush to the rescue -- hailing a cab with her old partner in crime driving -- to save Danny from a fate he doesn't deserve....

Joan Blondell may not wield a machine gun or beat anyone up, but it's fun to watch her ruthless rise to power. Blondie really belongs to another Warners rogues gallery, this one consisting of dangerously empowered women, the more troubling counterparts to Blondell's more typical gold-digger, of whom Barbara Stanwyck's Baby Face, who sleeps her way up the corporate ladder,  is the most notorious example. Pre-Code buffs may be reminded of Stanwyck's bedroom Nietzscheanism by Blondie's rise to the top of her profession, but gangland seems more meritocratic, and Blondie's success in it more truly earned, than the corporate world of Baby Face. If anything, Blondie's rapid rise begs the question: why is she so seemingly helpless and woebegone in the first part of the picture? Anger energizes her, it seems, as it does the Stanwyck character. That motivating anger separates these two pictures from the gold-digger comedies, and from the male gangster films. Blondie Johnson has little in the way of social consciousness, but it's more obviously a story of rebellion than other Warner films. At the same time, and perhaps for chivalrous reasons, Blondie doesn't pay the same price the male gangsters pay. She never actually kills anyone -- though you wonder why, when she gets the real dope from her spy, she doesn't have the janitor killed -- and the film is marred by going soft at the end. Blondie's goons end up only wounding Danny, and after he recovers everyone comes clean and everyone goes to jail. Blondie gets six years, but it's a happy ending because she and Danny will reunite after they finish their respective terms. I assume Louie gets the chair but they never say it for certain. Whatever the filmmakers intended, this finish turns the film into a comedy after all.

*   *   *

Blondie Johnson gets extra Pre-Code points for a singular piece of casting. One of the guys in the gang has a moll named Lulu. She's played by Toshia Mori, who made movie history earlier in 1933 by becoming the first non-Caucasian named as a "WAMPAS Baby Star" by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers. For a decade by then the annual annointing of Baby Stars was a big publicity event that got the actresses' pictures in newspapers across the country. Mori's class included such imminent luminaries as Ginger Rogers and Gloria Stuart. Mori was under contract to Columbia and was nominated by the studio as a Baby Star -- a star of tomorrow, that is -- after their initial choice quit on them. For Columbia it was a good way to promote their current release The Bitter Tea of General Yen, in which Mori had a prominent supporting role. Needless to say, Mori was stuck in stock Asian roles and was out of the movie business by 1937. Only Warner Bros., for one picture, accepted the premise that Mori was actually the peer of her sister Babies. In Blondie Johnson a white actor and a Japanese-American actress play lovers -- this would be taboo under Code Enforcement -- and Lulu's obvious Asian ethnicity passes completely without comment by anyone in the picture. The only hint of ethnic subservience is Lulu's portrayal of a maid in one of Blondie's cons. It's very likely that Lulu's part, admittedly relatively small, was written without ethnicity in mind, and that the Warner casting director, seeing the publicity pictures of Mori with the other Baby Stars, simply said "Why not?" For that alone you'd have to admire Blondie Johnson -- but there's plenty to like besides that.

Meanwhile, the original trailer plays on Blondell's gold-digger image while billing Blondie as "The Commander of Men." As usual, it's from TCM.com

Pre-Code Parade: POLLY TIX IN WASHINGTON (1933)

The late Shirley Temple would seem like the antithesis of Pre-Code cinema. Her breakthrough year was 1934, the year of the crackdown and the beginning of the Code Enforcement era, and it's tempting to see her rise to superstardom, becoming the number-one box office attraction by the following year, as proof of some profound dumbing-down of cinema under the Code. But while Temple became a star of A pictures in '34, at age six she was already a cinema veteran and a creature of Pre-Code cinema. Before she captivated the mainstream in Stand Up and Cheer and Little Miss Marker, Temple had been the leading lady of the Baby Burlesk series of one-reel comedy shorts produced by Educational Pictures. Billed as "The Spice of the Program," Educational is best known as the home of comedy stars in decline, Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon working there most notably during the Thirties. The Baby Burlesks are a cross between the Our Gang series and those horrific Dogville comedies; toddlers rather than dogs are made to stand on two legs and parody popular movies or current archetypes, discipline being enforced, according to Temple, by time outs in a room with only an ice block to sit on. Polly Tix is the Baby Burlesk version of the various political expose films in vogue in 1932 and 1933. It resembles Lionel Barrymore's star vehicle Washington Masquerade in some respects but isn't really beholden to one particular film. The virtuous political novice, elected on his vow to battle the Nipple Trust, has his virtue threatened when one of the big political operators throws Polly (Temple), the Vamp of Vashington, in his path. Here Shirley Temple is in full Pre-Code mode. Polly Tix would be exhibit A for those, then and now, who have felt that Hollywood had grown excessively crass and tasteless in the Pre-Code era. While the filmmakers may have thought it all cute, I can understand if it gives a modern viewer the creeps. Judge for yourself: since the Baby Burlesk series is in the public domain I can show you Polly Tix in Washington as uploaded to YouTube by yanevnu. I suspect that Temple may have evolved as she did even without Code Enforcement, but she definitely would not have made Baby Burlesks in that era. Such is history.

Pre-Code Parade: CAVALCADE (1933)

In 1933 the Academy could nominate as many films for Best Picture as now, and members had a slate of ten pictures to choose from. Some of the pictures we now rank among the best of that year didn't make the shortlist; there's no King Kong or Duck Soup or Dinner at Eight or The Invisible Man. But there were 42nd Street, Little Women, The Private Life of Henry VIII and Frank Capra's Lady for a Day. Capra was confident of victory for himself and his picture -- so confident that he took if for granted when Best Director presenter Will Rogers announced the winner, in his folksy way, by saying, "Come up and get it, Frank!" that the Oscar was his. He had forgotten that one of his two rivals (yes, there were only three nominees apiece for the major categories of individual achievement) was also named Frank. And to this day Cavalcade, directed by Frank Lloyd, continues to be forgotten. It is probably the least known of all the Best Picture winners, being rarely shown on American TV in modern times and rarely revived, to my knowledge, in the repertory houses. Most movie buffs knew it only by second-hand descriptions that did not sound promising. Lloyd's film adapted a Noel Coward pageant (with songs by himself and others) of recent English history, following the fortunes of two families, one aristocratic, the other their servants, from the end of the 19th century to the present day, first of the play and then of the film. The content might be summed up by the song performed in the film by the maid's daughter (the maid is Una O'Connor from Invisible Man) -- "Twentieth Century Blues." Misfortune plagues the steps of the aristocrats while the servant family rises to wealth as the daughter (Ursula Jeans) becomes a popular entertainer. It's not enough that the aristocrat family loses a son to the Great War; they have to have lost one on the Titanic earlier. But the old folks carry on, stumbling a bit at times -- the mother does a full faint when she gets the war news about her boy, injury added to the insult of the maid's revelation of her girl's love for the doomed boy -- and hope for the best, that being a revival of the ancient British spirit, represented in the film by the literal cavalcade of men and women on horseback, first seen over the opening credits and finally superimposed over the London skyline.

Coward envisioned Cavalcade as an epic stage spectacle with a cast of hundreds. A certain abstract artifice is probably inherent to such a concept, and is certainly lost when you translate the concept to film. The stage show must have been a success or else Fox Film would not have sought film rights, and I suspect that there was some concentration of vision and emotion under the proscenium arch that must dissipate across the expanse of filmed space. What may have been an enchanted castle becomes a field of corn under Lloyd's husbandry; Capra should have snatched that Oscar and run with it. To be fair, Lloyd must share the blame with the usually dependable production designer William Cameron Menzies, who was tasked with representing World War I without staging any battles. He comes up with the most inept sequence of film I can associate with him. Basically, as the already-standard medley of Great War songs (Tipperary, etc) plays we see a constant line of British soldiers marching through Europe. Periodically three female singers in military drag last seen serenading soldiers in a London nightclub reappear to mouth their lines. We take closer looks at the marching ranks and files, many of whom more or less faint to the accompaniment of explosions and machine gun fire. Repeat for each year of the war. This sequence alone earns Cavalcade a spot on the short list of worst Best Picture winners, but the rest of the film isn't much better. The Titanic sequence is risible, for instance, opening as the horsey set trots across a screen giving the date of the doomed ship's sailing, and closing, for those who missed all the other clues, as the scene's doomed lovers exit the frame to reveal a Titanic life preserver. The final insult is the "Twentieth Century Blues" sequence, set in Coward's representation of modern decadence -- a subject on which he had some expertise. Fanny Bridges sings with a black jazz band while among the spectators we see one woman seducing another, and one man seducing another. The horror! The races are mingling and the sexes aren't! Perhaps on stage this business, including the indignation of the old aristocrats, had a camp irony to it that's anything but apparent on film. Instead, the Cavalcade movie ends on a reactionary note that further alienates it from modern viewers. I can only attribute this film's Oscars to a fit of Anglomania in the Academy, and its later obscurity to their subsequent embarrassment. Historically, the Best Picture of any given year rarely has been even the best American picture, but the Oscar winners are a historic guide to what each generation of Academy members thought should be the best. We should be more familiar with Cavalcade, whether we like it or not, if we want to understand Hollywood's self-image and self-consciousness at the climax of the Pre-Code era, and how different from Pre-Code movies they were.

Pre-Code Parade: WHAT! NO BEER? (1933)

This is career death: Buster Keaton's final film for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio that destroyed him. The legend is that the studio people thought they understood comedy better than the greatest physical comic of the silent era. The truth was that Keaton's big-budget spectaculars for United Artists, The General and Steamboat Bill Jr. -- had not been especially popular with their original audiences, so Metro may have felt it necessary to steer Keaton in another direction, just as they would do, more successfully to an extent, with the Marx Bros. a few years later. Keaton made two silents for M-G-M that are conceded to retain some of his old spark. But Keaton in talkies proved hopeless. His voice made it easy for Metro to reinvent the Buster persona as an utter moron, though he did at least once revive his naive millionaire character for them. Worse, it was thought necessary that he say funny things, though thanks to the scripts he rarely did. Keaton wasn't reluctant to talk, but his own ideas for sound comedy were thwarted consistently. His inclinations ran from the parodic to the absurd. His idea to save his career was to film an all-star parody of Grand Hotel -- he'd wanted in on Grand Hotel itself but Lionel Barrymore got the part he wanted -- but of course the studio nixed the idea. In frustration with both his career and his marriage, he drank. In What! No Beer? he is often obviously sozzled on screen. That film might drive anyone to drink, whether you had to perform in it or watch it.

Edward Sedgwick directed; he made all but one of Keaton's Metro pictures, and by now was as void of inspiration as his star. Throughout the picture there are moments that have the potential for humor that might have been realized by a healthier Keaton and his old collaborators. There's potential, believe it or not, in the idea that Elmer Butts, a taxidermist, keeps money stuffed in his various specimens. In better days, Keaton might have run with the idea of storing much more in the stuffed animals, or using them as furniture, utensils, etc. But here Sedgwick seems to have no idea of how to frame the action so it works as gags. You see the same sort of failure repeatedly. Buster is handcuffed to Jimmy Durante -- in the story as well as in his career at that point -- and is flung about as Durante gesticulates wildly protesting their innocence to a judge. At his best Keaton would have choreographed this business with care and ensured that his director would have shot it to get the most laughs out of his pratfalls. In the finished product Sedgwick cluelessly shoots Buster crashing about aimlessly, as if his main concern -- and there's probably no "if" to it -- had been to record Durante's malaprops and mugging. Even Durante can't do anything with one of the film's big set pieces; his and Buster's first attempt to brew beer at their new brewery. Durante is working from an old family recipe that's pathetically small in scale given their resources, and the gag is that he, Buster and their three helpers (including stuttering Roscoe Ates) still louse up the job. Sedgwick has a large brewery set to work with, and no idea, probably having no input in its construction, of how to work with it. The sort of workplace comedy that the Three Stooges could do in their sleep seems beyond anyone's ability here. There's lots of spraying people with water, with hose gags that must have seemed old to the Lumiere brothers in 1896, but nothing that rises to the level of a true sight gag. What! No Beer? is one of the most ineptly directed comedies you'll ever see, and as such it exposes mercilessly how badly Keaton had deteriorated in his five years at Metro.

The idea is that Elmer Butts wants to make a million dollars to impress a girl (Phyllis Barry) he met outside an anti-Prohibition rally, not realizing that she's a gangster's moll. In this inspired-by-imminent-events fantasy, Prohibition is doomed by a national referendum, after some clumsy pratfalls in collapsible voting booths, and the Durante character assumes that beer will be legal the very next day. He convinces Elmer that he can make his million by investing his $10,000 nest egg in a brewery, but when they finally brew a batch large enough to sell they're raided by the cops. They're spared jail time only because they've actually failed to brew proper beer, but once Ates gives them a formula for then-legal "near beer" they become pawns in a power struggle between two gangsters for the last days of the bootleg market. In a badly written and performed scene one of the gangsters (Edward Brophy) invades Elmer's office, only to be impressed by Elmer's newly-learned sales talk (Buster conveniently reads his lines from the book) into thinking that "the frozen-faced guy" is a business mastermind. This alliance makes Elmer the enemy of the rival gangster (John Miljan) whose moll is the very girl Buster pines for. She exploits this to get information (and $10,000) from Elmer in the Pre-Code era's lamest seduction sequence, but she later inexplicably falls for him for real. The alleged slapstick highlight of the film is Elmer's thwarting of a hit on him by accidentally unloading his beer barrels from his truck so that they roll downhill and wipe out his assailants. It's a feeble imitation of the boulder gags from Seven Chances with none of the payoffs. The real climax comes when Mijan takes over the brewery and forces Durante & Co to make real beer. Elmer escapes by having himself sealed in a barrel and rolled off the premises. He then gathers a mob by driving through town promising free beer at the brewery. A horde descends on the place, and in the confusion Elmer takes out Miljan with a drop kick to the ankles that is, sad to say, the high point of acrobatics in this Buster Keaton picture. In the end, our heroes open a legal beer garden (misspelled "Butt's") and in a rush for his autograph another mob strips Elmer to his underwear, while Durante promises the audience that beer is coming soon to a town near them. He can't help adding a "hotcha-cha" to that, and I can't help wanting to break a bottle (or a barrel) over his head.

To be fair, Durante seems almost desperately conscious of a need to fill the void created by Keaton's implosion, even if his efforts seem to further suffocate his colleague. He's trying to save the picture, but Jimmy Durante can only do the opposite with his maddeningly repetitive shtick and his dismal malaprops. Some people actually dig that type of humor, and I can only feel sorry for them. Again, had the film had a more competent director and a more engaged star a better balance may have been struck between the co-stars' styles. A scene at Durante's barber shop is another missed opportunity. He raves about the referendum while lathering Elmer's face and while impulsively gesticulating cranks the lever that raises and lowers the barber chair, as all the while a stoic, silent -- almost Keatonesque -- black man struggles to shine Elmer's shoes. You can see the pieces of a promising gag sequence laying about, but Sedgwick is barely capable of putting one block on top of another and the result is more disorganized flailing about. In Sedgwick's defense, there are signs of heavy editing in the 65 minute picture. Shots are cut abruptly, probably in at least some cases to cover some lapse of Keaton's. In one case, near the end of the seduction scene, Sedgwick sets up a pratfall gag, but we never see Keaton take the fall. Had it gotten so bad that Buster couldn't manage such a simple task? Watching this film, you can believe it. It's one of the most demoralizing hours of cinema you could subject yourself to, and though you may know that Keaton would bounce back eventually, if not to full creative flower than at least in the esteem of movie lovers, you may find that hard to believe after seeing What! No Beer? This is a film that lives down to its bad reputation and may even exceed it. For some, my saying this may be a dare to watch the movie, but it lacks the spectacle and pathos of a more ambitious train wreck as well as anything like the incoherent inspiration that makes some bad films highly entertaining. What! No Beer? is so bad that it's terrible; for fans of Keaton it's downright horrifying.

A Cockeyed Nightmare of Fun: NOW PLAYING, Dec. 31, 1933

This year saved some of its biggest, or at least best-remembered films for last. To give you an idea of the big picture, here's the movie page of the Milwaukee Sentinel from Dec. 29:

Let's take a closer look at some of these.

Duck Soup is most likely the most beloved today of these films, and maybe the runner-up to King Kong in the posterity popularity contest. In legend Leo McCarey's picture was a flop and left the Marxes without a studio home until Irving Thalberg saved them at the cost of their edge. While it's not the biggest attraction for New Year's audiences in Milwaukee, at least if you measure by column inches, it's clearly a big one.

If the Christmas attractions were mainly single-star vehicles, for New Years Milwaukee's theaters went for the opposite approach, as exemplified by George Cukor's all-star comedy for M-G-M. Moderns might wonder at Marie Dressler's top billing but the old lady probably was the most popular star of those cast here. One might notice a slowing of Lee Tracy's momentum from earlier in the year, when we saw him top-billed in several comedies, since he only makes the second tier of stars here. His misadventures while filming Viva Villa! in Mexico marked a turning point that soon reduced the gabby actor to B stardom at best and character roles in later life.

RKO was still looking for an answer to Warner Bros.' new style of musical pictures, and this was their latest experiment. The emphasis is on spectacle on a nearly cartoonish scale, the money shot being the "bevy of singing, dancing beauties atop an armada of airplanes!" But the studio had some not-so-secret weapons with more staying power. Note how the ad tries to sell the Carioca as a new dance craze, without really identifying it with the couple who introduce it in the picture. There was some flexibility about the billing, as you can tell by comparing the ad above with the ad on the left. Dolores Del Rio is consistently the top banana, but the order rotates underneath. Fred Astaire, whose first major film showcase this is, bounces between second billing and fifth, in one instance ahead of his dance partner, the already-established film star (and veteran of the Warners spectacles) Ginger Rogers, in another beneath her. In retrospect, the way RKO learned to use Rogers, compared to how Warners did, is as significant as how they used Astaire. Rogers's best-known moment in a Warners musical is her rendition of "We're In the Money" in Gold Diggers of 1933, but her singing is inevitably overshadowed by the Busby Berkeley spectacle surrounding her. By emphasizing her virtuosity as a dancer as well as a singer, RKO made her, with Astaire, the spectacle itself. By focusing on virtuosity rather than the spectacle of sheer numbers, the studio found the answer to Berkely and Warners after several false starts. RKO's earlier comic musicals are so cartoonish at points that they border on the inhuman; they do little to endear themselves to posterity, unless you're a connoisseur of Pre-Code strangeness like me. With Astaire and Rogers, RKO would usher in the classical period of the Hollywood musical.

Here's a single-star vehicle opening at the Strand. In fact, they sell it like the star's biography.

It's a pretty funny picture in its grandly amoral way. I ought to give it a fresh look and write it up for the Pre-Code Parade sometime.

Finally, such a survey as ours would not be complete without the novelty of finding a film that no one remembers.

1933 was a pretty good year for Slim Summerville. He was part of a popular team with ZaSu Pitts and Horse Play may have been an attempt to launch a second franchise with Summerville and (god help us) Andy Devine. Whatever this is, it's clearly in competition with Duck Soup; you wouldn't advertise a movie as "a cockeyed nightmare of fun" otherwise. And admit it: if you heard about a cockeyed nightmare of fun happening somewhere, wouldn't you be interested? Strange to say, Slim himself doesn't look too interested in the ad. Maybe he knows something we don't, since for the time being Horse Play must remain a mystery to us. The past should always be a little mysterious, I suppose; it keeps us interested and leads to us learning things. I hope that people learned something or were at least entertained slightly by this series over the past year. I may pick another year and another city as a project for 2014, but I haven't decided yet. I'll make a resolution to make my mind up, and in the meantime I wish you all a Happy New Year -- or to be more modest, a Happy New Year's Day.

Now Playing: CHRISTMAS 1933

For their holiday attractions Milwaukee's movie houses depend on star power. In particular, the Palace depends on overwhelming star power. Check out this cast list:

Unfortunately, this Alice is notorious for putting all its stars under heavy makeup inspired by the original illustrations that left the performers unrecognizable except for their voices. Cary Grant may as well not be there as the Mock Turtle, for instance, though his weepy turn is one of the film's most memorable voice performances. Gary Cooper comes nearest to playing a human being and plays against type by falling off his horse a lot. Overall, one part inspired, one part stupendously misconceived. You can say that about a lot of films.

The other theaters worked on the assumption that one star was enough.

 

 

If any of these clippings has sparked a happy memory, consider that my Christmas gift (and 1933's) to you.

Pre-Code Parade: THE COLLEGE COACH (1933)

Pat O'Brien may be best remembered today for his title role in the 1940 biopic Knute Rockne, All-American, if only because of his proximity to Ronald Reagan in the film that gave the future President his "Gipper" nickname. In that picture, playing the legendary Notre Dame leader, O'Brien was the ideal of a college sports coach. The contrast with Pre-Code O'Brien could not be more stark, for in the title role of William Wellman's athletic satire the actor is for all intents and purposes the anti-Rockne. Sure, there are points of resemblance: like Rockne, who died two years before College Coach was made, Wellman's Coach Gore is a celebrity and a constant winner. But Gore lacks Rockne's loyalty to a single school; he sells his services to the highest bidder. The high bidder is Calvert University, despite a grave budget deficit. The trustees' desperate belief, then as now, is that the revenue from a successful football program will finance worthy academic projects. Gore couldn't give two farts about academics, promptly hiring patently unqualified ringers out of football mills designed to give them the high grades they need to get into college. To give you a visual idea, one of these paragons of amateurism is Nat Pendleton with a moronic Slavic accent; an unhappy subtext of College Coach is that any football player with an ethnic name is academically suspect. The real stars of the team are Buck Weaver (Lyle Talbot), a sleazy showboater, and Philip Sargent Jr. (Dick Powell), the son of the college president (Arthur Byron). Powell is the real star of the picture, in fact, and since he had become a star in 1933 by virtue of his performances in 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, Phil gets to play the piano and sing a song to himself for no reason relevant to the story. Phil's a good boy and a good student, or at least he wants to be -- we see him hard at work in the chem lab under Donald Meek's tutelage, but Buck doesn't give a damn. The two are incompatible teammates; Buck defies the coach himself if he can see an opening to score on his own, and Gore makes them roommates in the hope that, following a locker-room dustup, Phil will knock Buck down a few pegs. Buck's idea of cultured conversation is to show off a pin-up poster and ask Phil, "How'd ya like to put your finger in her coffee?"

Little does Gore know, at first, that Buck is making moves on his wife (Ann Dvorak). Mrs. Gore feels neglected by Gore's genuine dedication to winning and his sometimes contemptuous rounds of publicity arranged by a largely self-appointed agent (Hugh Herbert), while Buck would probably jump anything with decent curves. When Gore finally gets wise, he throws Buck off the team. Meanwhile, Phil quits in disgust with both the program and himself after he deliberately flunks the chem exam, knowing that practice and publicity gave him not time to study properly, only to find that he had passed (albeit with a D) despite turning in an empty exam booklet. Furthermore, Sargent Sr. is inclined to get rid of Gore after an opposing player is mortally injured during a game. Somehow, after everything, we're still supposed to root for Calvert to win the big game, and to celebrate when both Phil, possessed by school spirit, and Buck, manipulated by Mrs. Gore, rejoin the team. But the genius of the picture is that Calvert wins and Buck becomes the hero despite learning nothing during the picture. As before, he breaks up a play designed as a pass to Phil and runs for the winning touchdown himself. His comeuppance comes when he realizes that Mrs. Gore, having reconciled with hubby, had played him so he'd play. Preparing to declare his love for her to reporters, he sees the truth through a door and credits his success to dear old mother instead. By then, the Gores are ready to move on. The school just beaten has offered the coach $10,000 more than Calvert paid him. He hesitates, thinking of his wife, but she grabs the phone and accepts the offer for him.

College Coach isn't exactly a hard-hitting expose of the corruption of academia by athletics. The picture is more amused than outraged by its subject and its high-spirited cynicism is Pre-Code to a tee. Powell may get the top billing but if anyone steals the picture from him it isn't O'Brien, who in the title role is equally susceptible to theft, but Lyle Talbot in one of his best Pre-Code showcases, in a role he clearly enjoyed playing. Talbot often comes out second-best, at best, in these movies, but here he achieves a kind of seedy charisma, swaggering through the picture with a perpetual five o'clock shadow, unrepentant and nearly imperturbable despite some hard knocks along the way. Modern viewers may be distracted by John Wayne's very brief appearance as a student, near the end of his underwhelming run at Warner Bros., but Talbot should make more of an impression than he ever would until he played Lex Luthor (and quite well, too) in the Atom Man vs. Superman serial. William Wellman was also near the end of his far more memorable run at Warners, and while this isn't one of his more memorable films visually he gets the job done with typical crisp efficiency and gives O'Brien and Talbot their chances to shine. College Coach isn't on the level of The Public Enemy or Wild Boys of the Road, but it may be more relevant today, in some respects, than those or other Wellman masterworks at Warner Bros.  People (and not just movie buffs) would get this film today if they gave it a try.

And here's our usual Warner Bros. trailer, courtesy of TCM.com

Now Playing: DEC. 10, 1933

Little Women ruled the Milwaukee box office last week, earning a second week at the Warner, while The Invisible Man departs after two weeks at the Alhambra. There isn't a lot of competition among the new releases, several of which are deemed secondary to the live attractions at the city's movie palaces.

Sing Sinner Sing is an independent picture loosely based on a recent celebrity scandal that apparently has fallen into the public domain and can be seen for free at various internet sites. I may check it out myself.

The Palace opts for class in both live and screen attractions. It tells you something about the Pre-Code era that Paramount Pictures would bring Dorothea Wieck, the star of pioneer lesbian picture Maedchen in Uniform (aka the Blue is the Warmest Color of its day) to Hollywood and star her in an American movie.

The trend continues at the Oriental, a theater we haven't visited very often, but the novelty's worth noting this week.

Beverly was Mae's younger sister (born Mildred), five years her junior. She never broke into the movies, her sole IMDB credit being a German TV special from the 1960s. As for the movie, I just saw Professional Sweetheart last month and had plenty to say about this strange Ginger Rogers vehicle.

The Wisconsin puts its movie up front after hosting the Earl Carroll Vanities live for a week. This theater presumably has confidence in one of the most popular actresses of the period.

This is definitely counterprogramming, for whatever else you might say about Marie Dressler, she was indisputably not a little woman. Speaking of the defending champ, one of its stars, Frances Dee, has another picture playing this week.

In this picture, Dee recalled nearly seventy years later, she played "a kleptomaniac, a nymphomaniac, and anything in between." For another picture you might have mentioned that you had a "Star of Little Women," but I don't think the audience for Little Women would appreciate this one.

Now Playing: DEC. 4, 1933

Universal was the big winner in Milwaukee last week as The Invisible Man gets held over at the Alhambra.

Meanwhile, Footlight Parade lasted only two weeks in first run, failing to reproduce the blockbuster five-week run of Gold Diggers of 1933. The city's flagship Warner Bros. theater doesn't have a studio picture to run this week, but RKO does.

Family fare wasn't alien to Pre-Code cinema, after all. Meanwhile, here's The Tudors, Pre-Code style.

Charles Laughton would win the Oscar for his work here, and he would also set a precedent for future audiovisual Henries by later playing a monster. Posterity may not find Cimarron so vital nor She Done Him Wrong so sensuous, but Laughton's performance probably remains the image of the default image of the king to this day.

In terms of newspaper ad space, our next picture is probably the most ambitious of the week.

In the other Milwaukee paper the Man's Castle ad takes up nearly half a page.  The Frank Borzage film (hence the reference to Seventh Heaven, the director's silent smash) was one of Columbia's increasingly frequent bids for prestige (hence the reminder of Lady For a Day, from earlier this year). For Spencer Tracy it was a break from his mostly unfulfilling dues-paying years at Fox. For comparison purposes, here's a review of this and two of his better-regarded Fox pictures.

Finally, another case of the stage attraction overshadowing the feature movie.

 

The movie on the program (if you can make out the title in the lower right-hand corner) was another of those Spencer Tracy films for Fox, this one controversial even for Pre-Code cinema because its kidnapping storyline was thought insensitive during a period of high-profile real-life crimes. It might actually be worth seeing for that, but the Wisconsin management probably made the right call by going with the cheesecake.

Now PLaying: NOV. 24, 1933

Footlight Parade will not match the five-week run of Gold Diggers of 1933 at Milwaukee's Warner theater. That doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't as popular as the previous Busby Berkeley spectacular. Since the summer, the Warner theater chain had refurbished the Strand into a first-run theater. To make room for a new Paul Muni picture, Warners moves Footlight Parade from the flagship Warner to the Strand, as illustrated below.

You'll also note the competition for the Warner duo. Let's take a slightly closer look at each.

James Whale's Invisible Man is now, after 80 years, one of 1933's best-known pictures. As part of the Universal horror cycle, it's one of the few 1933 films that remains culturally relevant on the pop level. The Whale film may be second only to King Kong in that respect. During the buildup, Universal made big claims for this one.

The other point of interest in the ballyhoo is the way the ads build up Claude Rains, emphasizing his stage credentials, without letting on that you'd see his face only at the very end of the film. That didn't stop him from making the hoped-for impression.

If The Invisible Man is a living film today, Hoopla isn't.

Hoopla was Clara Bow's second film for Fox and the follow-up to her scandalous comeback picture Call Her Savage. Such was the career of the 1920s "It Girl" that a comeback film was necessary when Bow was not yet thirty. Call Her Savage has become a canonical Pre-Code picture, but Hoopla hasn't the same reputation. Bow's comeback ended here; apparently it was her own call to call it quits but it seems right in retrospect that she bow out before the Code Enforcement crackdown. We can keep an image of her in our imaginations as a star who wasn't and maybe couldn't be tamed.

Now Playing: NOVEMBER 17, 1933

Last week the Universal drama Only Yesterday was the big winner at the Milwaukee box office, or so we can infer from its being held over for a second week. It probably won't be the champ this week, because Busby Berkeley is back.

 

Following the success of 42nd Street back in March, Gold Diggers of 1933 was a summer blockbuster, staying at the Warner for an extraordinary five weeks. For their third spectacular musical this year Warners piles it on by throwing James Cagney into the mix in his first musical starring role.

The film may need no introduction, but here's the trailer anyway from TCM.com. You'll be excused for thinking it's a Twentieth Century-Fox picture at first with that drumroll, but Warners will be excused, too, since there was no Twentieth Century Fox in 1933.



What are the other theaters throwing into this buzzsaw? Only Yesterday is standing its ground, but the New Garden goes with the latest in a popular Pre-Code series.

It may have been the Honolulu detective's greatest case, but this adaptation of the Earl Derr Biggers novel in which Chan first appeared is one of the few big-studio 1933 releases (along with Warners' notorious Convention City) to have gone lost. Actually several of the early Chans are lost, and I'm not sure why. Convention City was lost because it was considered unreleasable in the Code Enforcement era; perhaps later politically correct attempts to suppress the Chan films account for the loss of this one.

Meanwhile, the Palace tries to match Footlight Parade's quantity with the quality of a live nude dancer on stage -- and Popeye the Sailor Man

Faith Bacon was the legendary Sally Rand's principal rival as a fan dancer and actually sued Rand for stealing her gimmick. Bacon lost the battle for history and died, most likely by suicide, in 1956. Here she is somewhere in between, in a "soundie" uploaded to YouTube by vitajazz.

Pre-Code Parade: PROFESSIONAL SWEETHEART (1933)

With Ginger Rogers leading the charge, fresh from 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, and Frank McHugh and Allen Jenkins following close behind, this William A. Seiter comedy looks like a Warner Bros. invasion of RKO. However, Professional Sweetheart has a certain cartoonish amorality to it that's more characteristic of RKO itself than of Warners. It's a sendup of radio reflecting the already widespread awareness that real-life personalities didn't live up to the personas broadcast over the wireless. Ginger plays Glory Eden, the "Purity Girl" who sings for the Ippsie Wippsie Washcloth company. We recognize immediately -- contemporaries probably caught it as soon as Rogers appeared on screen -- a discrepancy between the performer and her radio image. Sotto voce, she threatens the MC that she'll close the program with some unscripted if not unprintable words if she doesn't get the "doodads" she was promised earlier. In a nice juggling of sound and image, we hear the Purity Girl sing her inane tune while the MC frantically runs around outside the studio trying to secure delivery of the doodads and protesting Glory's grasping nature to anyone he can grab. The doodads finally arrive; they seem to be lingerie that Glory's patron Mr. Ipswich (Gregory Ratoff) displays by holding them against his crotch. This only temporarily satisfies her; Ippsie Wippsie will have to do more if they want her to sign a long-term contract. Her main beef with the contract is all the morals clauses in it. Plucked from a small-town orphanage, Glory dreams of doing the town and indulging herself, but her employers won't even let her eat foods they deem inconsistent with her the Purity Girl's wholesome image. Her fantasies of Harlem are fueled by her maid Vera (Theresa Harris), an aspiring entertainer in her own right. Ipswich and his team (McHugh plays Speed the press agent) won't relent on most of the clauses, but figure that if they allow her a boyfriend she'll be happy. They seek out an Anglo-Saxon type ("Say, he's white!" Ipswich exclaims on seeing his picture) and find Jim, a fan from Kentucky (Norman Foster) with a performing bug of his own -- he enjoys reciting bad poetry. As Ippsie Wippsie starts a publicity buildup for an on-air wedding, the company's great rival, Kelsey Dishrags (Edgar Kennedy's the boss, Jenkins his minion), tries to entice Glory away with a contract free of morals clauses. Her enthusiasm for this offer disillusions Jim somewhat, but he decides to elope with her to Kentucky in order to tame her.

Rogers has already spent a good part of the film in her underwear, and there's been much fun made of Franklin Pangborn's effeminacy, but things get even more Pre-Code from here. While the Ippsie Wippsie people wonder where Glory went, Vera brazenly proposes herself as the new Purity Girl; her impromptu audition is a decidedly more sensuous rendering of Glory's theme song, "Imaginary Sweetheart." Meanwhile, in Kentucky, Jim attempts to discipline his angry new spouse, but Glory won't take the archetypal spanking sitting down. She fights back -- we saw her fury earlier when she hurled a library of unwanted books at Ipswich and friends -- until Jim lays her out with a sock on the jaw. Chagrined, he draws water to revive her. Already revived, Glory decides she'll enjoy the attention and plays dead a while longer. McHugh and Jenkins are dispatched to the hills by their respective masters to lure Glory back. McHugh gets the idea that if they actually do hire Vera as the Purity Girl and put her on the air, jealousy will draw Glory back to New York. It's a good plan, better even than Speed thought. His idea was that Glory would be jealous of Vera taking her spot. He did not reckon on the way Jim would respond to hearing Vera sing. "Her voice sure does ... hey, they shouldn't oughta put that on the radio!" he sputters, but soon he's swaying uncontrollably to Vera's rhythm. And remember, he's been captivated by the voice of a black woman who's just taken over a white woman's spot on the air. Glory's definitely ready to go back to work, but now she wants Jim to share air time with her. However, Jenkins has stolen a march on McHugh and the Ipswich team. Having seen earlier how they'd tricked Jim by letting him recite his doggerel into a dead microphone, Jenkins has signed Jim to a contract to do his thing for Kelsey Dishrags. Since Glory won't work without Jim anymore, what's Ippsie Wippse to do? Since this is a romantic comedy, a merger of souls is echoed by a merger of companies in one program. Poor Vera is lost in the shuffle, admittedly, but what else is new?

This little picture is such an embarrassment of comic character actor riches that they don't have time to find something interesting for Zasu Pitts to do. She shows up early as a reporter seeking an interview with Glory ("You can trust me," she says, "I eat with the stars, I sleep with the stars" -- at which point she has Glory's complete attention) and is supposed to become some sort of confidant of our protagonist, but disappears for big chunks of the picture, though she does get the last word. Edgar Kennedy is also relatively underutilized; there's little time to get his slow burn really going. Given all the talent in front of the camera, Professional Sweetheart is inevitably less than the sum of its parts, but it's such a good-natured whirlwind of exuberant irreverence that it's hard not to be amused. It was the start of a second tour of duty for Ginger Rogers at RKO, this one securing her place in movie history, and while she comes off a little more obnoxious than normal, as a comedienne she got off on the right foot. That would prove a useful skill.