DVR Diary: POSSE FROM HELL (1961)

As a rule I avoid watching films made after 1953 on Encore Western, since the premium cable channel, catering to a demographic presumed not to have upgraded to HD and annoyed by black bars at the top and bottom of their screens, resolutely refuses to show its movies in the letterbox format. But I've had an appetite for western stories recently -- part of a larger appetite for pulpish fiction that may result in something new soon from the Think 3 empire -- and have started recording more of Encore's B and B+ product from the golden era of Hollywood westerns. That brings me to the feature-film debut of Herbert Coleman, who made just one feature more. The real auteur here seems to be screenwriter Clair Huffaker, adapting one of his own novels. Huffaker had a violent, hard-boiled sensibility that takes some of his scripts, particularly 1964's Rio Conchos, right to the border of spaghetti westerns. As a novelist, Huffaker was most inspired in 1958, when he wrote Guns of Rio Conchos, Flaming Lance (filmed by Don Siegel as Flaming Star) and Posse From Hell. The movie of Posse From Hell is an Audie Murphy vehicle, but the war hero, starting his slide from A pictures, is backed by a solid cast of character actors. Murphy plays Banner Cole, a gunfighter called into the misnamed town of Paradise to lead a posse against a gang of vicious hell bastards including Vic Morrow and Lee Van Cleef. Prison escapees, they rode into town, robbed the bank and made good their escape after invading a saloon and taking its denizens hostage. Morrow, the leader, threatens to shoot a hostage every five minutes and proves his point by killing the hostage he'd appointed his spokesman. To hunt down these terrors, Cole ends up with a motley crew he's quick to dismiss as worthless to a man, but over time he distinguishes the wheat from the chaff. The posse includes such stalwarts as Robert Keith (crazy old army man who thinks he can give orders), Royal Dano (desperate uncle of the girl kept by the gang as hostage and later rape victim) and Rudolfo Acosta (intelligent unstereotyped Indian tracker), but the standout of the group is John Saxon as a bank employee recently arrived from the east and assigned by his employer to recover its money. Neither Huffaker nor Saxon overstates the character's greenhorn aspect, that point being made most harshly early when Saxon, after his first ever full day in the saddle, needs alcohol applied to his ravaged rear end. The young actor impresses the most out of the whole cast as someone who starts out just slightly prissy and hesitant yet quickly proves himself willing to learn while acquiring a different set of priorities from his bank employers. The camaraderie among Murphy, Saxon and Acosta -- the posse in its final form after the more dysfunctional members die or quit -- is the best thing about the picture, especially the way the other two take a think-nothing-of-it attitude when Murphy haltingly apologizes for having earlier lumped them with the other losers in the posse.

Coleman was not exactly a visionary director, so I felt I wasn't missing much by having the sometimes setbound picture cropped. Huffaker keeps the story moving and Coleman follows along efficiently enough. Murphy really isn't much of an actor but he plays off the varied character cast effectively within the limited scope of his laconic character. Morrow is so intriguingly mad at the start that it's disappointing that he doesn't get to do much more the rest of the way, but Van Cleef gets a nice death scene, begging for help as Murphy and Saxon pump him for info on his cohorts. The most noteworthy thing about the picture visually is its violence. Men go down hard when shot and their shirts are impressively bloody when we see them close. The degree of brutality doesn't approach the savagery of Rio Conchos or its Italian peers, but it elevates Posse From Hell somewhat above the bland norm for B westerns, as does the sheer number of good actors involved. It's no more than a solid B-western, but that's still better than a lot of far more expensive pictures these days, and anyone with an appetite for unpretentious western action ought to be satisfied for 90 minutes by this one.

DVR Diary: NORMA RAE (1979)

Note the innocuous poster image of Sally Field in her first Academy Award winning role. She has her arms up like she should be holding her iconic "UNION" sign, but the poster really gives no idea of the content of Martin Ritt's movie. Maybe the studio wanted to mask the serious content of the picture, which were it remade now might be perceived, in some quarters, as a more radical film than the actual film seemed to be in 1979. On the poster, Field is not the drab yet defiant creature of the movie, a character based on a real person on the winning side of a real struggle to unionize a southern textile plant. The poster image is more like the spiritual essence of Norma Rae Webster, whom the film finds a single mother of three, each child having a different father. Once a waitress, according to an opening-credits image, she's now working at the O.P. Henley mill, in a South then seen as the last bastion of resistance to the righteous tide of organized labor. Into town comes Reuben Warshowsky (Ron Leibman), a union organizer from Noo Yawk embarking on the latest campaign to unionize Henley. Early in the action Norma Rae gets a promotion to the spot check department, meaning a precious extra $1.50 an hour. But she knows that it'll make her unpopular with her fellow workers, and the first time she gets called a fink and blamed for someone getting canned she demotes herself back to the ranks. Something matters more than money and security to her, despite her struggle to reassert her independence from her father and co-worker (Pat Hingle). Before long she's getting married to fun-loving Sonny (Beau Bridges) and taking a more active role in Ruben's union campaign. Norma wants autonomy and commitment -- solidarity rather than dependence both at home and at work. Her struggle endangers her job and to a lesser extent her marriage as the bosses scheme to turn the races against each other and Sonny complains about chores left undone.

It all turns around in the film's famous Capra-esque (yet based on fact) moment when, on the brink of being fired and arrested for copying out an inflammatory office posting, she climbs a table and holds her sign aloft in lieu of the more customary big speech. Did that reticence earn Field her Oscar? Or was it the later scene, after she's arrested and bailed out of jail, when she breaks down and cries in Reuben's car? Hers is a layered performance building on her innate spunk with virtues and flaws, loyalties and grudges. Norma Rae is an imperfect heroine and once what one might have called a loose woman. All the makings of an ad hominem argument are there, but the film's point is that they have nothing to do with the struggle for the union; they're not the main thing to judge Norma by.  Some people may still think differently, and the sad thing is that there may be more of them than there were in 1979, when the justice of the union cause may well have gone unquestioned in most theaters. You also can't help wondering what became of the O.P. Henley mill, of Norma Rae and all her friends, over the subsequent thirtysome years. The place probably closed, but did Norma get to retire first? Inevitably, Norma Rae is now a period piece, worth watching for its authentic location work as well as for Field's performance, but it's probably even more a period piece than the filmmakers ever intended. Its committed optimism about solidarity and struggle dates it and lends it some unwanted retroactive pathos. It's hard to imagine the film inspiring people to refight the old battles when someone's probably sold the battlefield and built a strip mall there.

DVR Diary: MOBY DICK (1930)

After Rin-Tin-Tin, John Barrymore was probably Warner Bros.' biggest star of the silent era. With the arrival of sound, the studio must have felt confident that in Barrymore, famed for his stage work before he went before the camera, they had an ace up their sleeve. He actually was in their first Vitaphone feature, but 1926's Don Juan had only a musical soundtrack, and Barrymore did not speak. That same year, he starred in The Sea Beast, a free adaptation -- to put it mildly -- of Moby Dick. That was still a silent, but Warners must have been pleased enough with it to produce a talking remake four years later. This time the movie went by the novel's name, though it was no more faithful to Herman Melville than The Sea Beast was. It isn't perfectly faithful to The Sea Beast, either, and that's probably a point in the sound film's favor.

As the star, Barrymore doesn't play Melville's point-of-view, audience-identification character Ishmael, but the book's most famous character, Captain Ahab. Following Sea Beast, the 1930 Moby Dick makes Ahab Ceeley the protagonist, indeed the hero of the story. We meet him as a harpoonist on the whaler Mary Ann, returning to New Bedford after years at sea. Ahab is the Douglas Fairbanks of the 19th century, cutting capers atop the mast as women watch admiringly. There's something slightly insane about him already, but I can't tell whether that's in the script or Barrymore's unrestrained contribution to the film. The Great Profile is good with the dialogue, naturally, but he does too much with his eyes, as if still stuck in the silent style of movie acting. Or he may have been blotto throughout the production. Whatever the problem, it seems hard to believe -- the star being 48 years old also has something to do with this -- that winsome Faith (Joan Bennett) would dump Ahab's priggish, lubberish, yet far younger brother Derek (Lloyd Hughes) for the old salt. It happens, however, but in a departure from the core text -- The Sea Beast, that is -- Derek doesn't follow Ahab out to sea to sabotage his career and his romantic prospects. For most of Moby Dick, Derek is simply a sullen, sulky presence, as if realizing he doesn't belong in the story, having been invented for The Sea Beast rather than by Melville. Somehow Ahab manages to get his leg gnawed off by the white whale without Derek's help. When he returns, peg-legged, to New Bedford, Faith flees in horror from him in a moment of weakness, and here Ahab acquires his obsession to avenge his lost hopes upon the whale.

While quantitatively less deviant from the novel than The Sea Beast, the 1930 Moby Dick nevertheless misses no opportunity to completely miss any points Melville meant to make. In the novel, Ahab as captain of the Pequod is an employee of the merchants who paid for the ship and its provisions; his hunt for the whale is before all else a transgression from his obligation to his employers. In the movie, he is outright master of his own ship, which is not the Pequod, having bought it in Singapore. While in the novel Ishmael and the rest of the crew are there of their own free will, in the talkie Ahab is obliged to shanghai a crew of rabble in New Bedford, improbably including his brother, after most of his terrified men jump ship. They have no other task than to hunt the whale, so there's no reason for anyone to try to dissuade him -- so long to most of the novel's dramatic tension. Instead, Ahab finally has it out with his brother, who assumes falsely that he's been singled out for torture, and in cinema's ultimate blasphemy against literature, kills Moby Dick singlehandedly -- his harpoon strikes from on board the whale draw forth gushers of black Pre-Code gore -- and then returns home in triumph to claim his love.

Movies have always taken liberties with literature, if only because cinema necessarily has different narrative rules and possibilities. It's not impossible for a movie to stray far from its literary source and yet remain a good movie. The best example of that I can think of, for American literature, is Michael Mann's adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans. At the opposite extreme sits Roland Joffe's adaptation of The Scarlet Letter. While Lloyd Bacon's Moby Dick is, as I said above, an incomparable travesty of Melville's story, as a movie it comes a little closer to Mann than to Joffe. For an early talkie it's a visual treat, thanks to Robert Kurrle's photography of an impressive New Bedford set and special effects that are mostly not bad. There are some well-executed process shots of Ahab's harpoon boat pursuing the whale, and the production only falters when it has to introduce a fake whale that looks like a Macy's Thanksgiving balloon to pursue live actors in the water. Barrymore may be too over-the-top from the start to convince as a romantic lead, but once the origin-story half of the film is over he's entitled to be as crazy as he needs to be. The star may have appreciated the handicap of his age, since here and in the following year's Svengali he seems more determined to be the next Lon Chaney than to be a great lover. He's supported by a remarkable cast of grotesques as his crew -- boy, did they have faces then! -- led by Noble Johnson (of King Kong fame) as Queequeg, Ahab's sidekick here instead of Ishmael's. As Derek, Hughes is too much of a wet blanket to be a compelling antagonist, and the filmmakers may have toned down the character's villainy for that reason. Bacon's Moby Dick may be a travesty, but being motivated by showmanship rather than political correctness, as was the case with Joffe's Scarlet Letter, it's forgivably fun to watch, amusing rather than offensive in its brazen deviance from Melville. If you know what to expect going in -- or if you have no familiarity with Moby Dick whatsoever, you may find this an entertaining picture on its own terms.

DVR Diary: THE EVIL WITHIN (1970)

Always a weaker rival to Turner Classic Movies, the Fox Movie Channel more or less gave up on the competition earlier this year when it began showing contemporary movies with commercials in prime time. From early morning to mid-afternoon, however, FMC still shows the old stuff commercial-free, and if anything they've delved deeper into their library than before to broadcast obscure oddities. For example, here's a Filipino-directed crime melodrama shot in India and starring one of the subcontinent's biggest stars, the late Dev Anand, alongside future blaxploitation actor and S.W.A.T. star Rod Perry, who sings the picture's title song. Directed by Lamberto V. Avellana, The Evil Within's first reel promises more craziness than the picture ultimately delivers. We follow a stocky fellow known only as "The Fat Man" on a series of fatal rounds. Without preliminaries, we open with him stabbing someone. In short order he leaves a trail of bloody bodies in his wake. He may be an implausible fighter but he's a charismatic attacker, often screaming before he strikes. If he's the antagonist we may be on to something -- but eight minutes into the picture, he's shot in the back and killed in perfunctory manner by the minions of Hakim, a more ordinary figure who now settles into the primary villain role. The Fat Man was a Syndicate enforcer and his death signals a power play for control of the opium racket. That brings in Anand (playing "Dev") and Perry (playing "Rob"), the latter having survived a rare non-fatal encounter with the Fat Man during that brief, glorious rampage. One powerful clan runs the drug trade, buying the opium from the mountain tribes and shipping it out to the wider world. The clan is riven by family feuds, and for a while it looks like our heroes will play the Red Harvest game of playing criminals against each other. The crooks need little prodding in this direction, their rivalries ultimately complicated by a lesbian love triangle that leaves Dev himself in a shotgun-toting rage by the end of the show.

It's hard to keep track of the villains in this one; just as Hakim abruptly eliminated the Fat Man, so he, too, is dispatched with little ceremony midway through the picture, after cajoling Dev's girlfriend of the moment into betraying him by promising her money so she can go to England. Without a strong core villain or a coherent menace of some kind it's hard to hold interest in this sort of story, and it doesn't help that Avellana brings very little energy to the action. In his defense, Fox Movie ran the movie "formatted to fit your screen," possibly subverting his compositions, but the story itself moves sluggishly. If this English-language picture was intended to put Anand over globally, it didn't work. The actor was fluent in English, earning a college degree in English lit, but his delivery is blandly urbane, almost more philosophical than witty, and he was probably too old for his action-romance role by this time. This film is Perry's on-screen debut and he provides little more than -- excuse the expression -- color. His presence may have made the film more marketable during the Seventies, but IMDB doesn't indicate if the film was ever released in American theaters. One interesting aspect of his role is the throwaway acknowledgment that Rob is a Muslim; challenged to swear an oath on his presumed Christian faith, he tells a tribesman that he's of the faith that "looks to the desert."  More colorful are the locations used, especially the luxurious fortress where the film's final act takes place, but Avellana never manages to make the action live up to the setting. All the materials are here for an exotic, eccentric spectacle, and it isn't hard to envision a Bollywood director, a blaxploitation specialist or any number of other Filipino filmmakers making more of it than this crew does. Still, the fact that The Evil Within played on American cable television is remarkable, and it reminds us that Fox Movie Channel is still worth watching -- or at least its schedule is, on the chance of discovering something as extraordinary as it is obscure.

DVR Diary: BLACK GOLD (1947)

Phil Karlson's sentimental Cinecolor spectacle marks a multiple milestone. One of the first releases by Monogram Pictures under its new upmarket Allied Artists label, it's also, to the best of my knowledge, the first starring role for future Oscar winner and Hollywood legend Anthony Quinn, who had been toiling as heavies and in supporting roles for a decade prior. As such, if I'm right, it sets a tone for Quinn's subsequent star career, for right off the bat we have him as an earthy ethnic type, more wise than intelligent, whose vitality is his greatest virtue. The film itself, based partly on fact and written by Agnes Christine Johnson, is a curious document of its time, progressive and patronizing at the same time, an avowedly anti-racist film bordering on stereotype whenever its star is on screen.

It opens with a strong hint of the tougher tales Karlson would tell later, with a couple of cowboy types bringing an old Chinese man and his Americanized son across the border from Mexico. The boy, Danny (Ducky Louie, probably best remembered as a young Filipino martyr in Back to Bataan, also with Quinn) was born here, but the old man's just come across the ocean. His journey ends in the desert as the cowboys shoot him in the back after taking his money. Danny's horse throws him and drags him, but the cowboys skedaddle at the sight of what they think is a Border Patrol man before they can finish the kid off. The lone rider is no lawman, but Charlie's Eagle (Quinn), a reservation rancher and horse breeder who rescues Danny and gently warns him against blaming all whites for the crimes of the cowboys. White men killed Charlie's own father but he got over his hate and has come to know good whites as well as bad. He takes Danny under his wing on a trip to Mexico, where he plans to race his filly Black Hope, but Charlie doesn't understand the racing business. Signing the horse up for a claiming race, he's stunned when a slick breeder puts up the claim money and takes possession of Black Hope after the horse wins. Charlie and Danny promptly steal the horse back and bring him home to the Eagle ranch, where Charlie's wife (played by Quinn's own wife, Katherine De Mille) waits stoically, but with almost instinctual anticipation of his return, every time Charlie goes wandering as is his ancient wont. Charlie doesn't exactly live by the old ways, but he has some of the old instincts, including an aversion to closed spaces. But now that he's settled down for awhile, the Eagles set about adopting Danny and sending him to school. A few chants of "Chin Chin Chinaman" are enough to keep the kid away from class, but a pretty schoolteacher and parental pressure set him straight. All is well for Danny except for that great adolescent rite of passage, the death of a beloved animal. Charlie has cajoled a prestigious breeder into mating Black Hope with Black Tony, a prize thoroughbred, but the mare won't long survive the foaling of Black Gold and Charlie has to put one in her brain while Danny cries inconsolably.

Black Gold was a real Indian-owned steed that won the 1924 Kentucky Derby, and Charlie Eagle is very loosely based on Al Hoots, the man who actually had a misadventure in a Mexican claiming race and whose mare was the mother of the actual horse. The concept of an adopted Chinese son who rides Black Gold to victory is an innovation of the film script. It's an admirable multicultural gesture but the picture hardly seems progressive with Quinn's performance in the foreground. While Charlie's wife is rez-educated and speaks impeccable English, our hero babbles in Hollywood pidgin, speaking of himself consistently in the third person. At least that's better than "me" this and "me" that, I suppose. Charlie's simplicity is hard to swallow sometimes. How plausible is it that a landowner in oil country could be as indifferent to the prospect of striking oil as Charlie is? But Black Gold shows Charlie caring very little whether his well comes in and complaining when the gusher soils his land. So horse-obsessed is he that the only benefit he sees from the well is when someone calls the oil "Black Gold" and gives him a name for his foal. Indeed, the oil proves his undoing when an injury Charlie suffers while wandering too close to the well saps his strength. In the would-be tearjerking highlight of the picture the hero decides to die oldschool, wandering into the desert to meet his maker, only to have his wife, son and horse show up to comfort him. Unfortunately, Charlie's demise take the life out of the picture, so that Danny's ride to victory at Churchill Downs proves anticlimactic. In part that's because Karlson, relying on actuality footage filmed at the track by B. Reeves Eason, doesn't figure out how to make the race dramatic. But the main reason is that Black Gold's race was Charlie Eagle's dream more than anyone else's, and without Charlie seeing it and getting vindicated the film has no real payoff. Understandably, Quinn soon returned to character acting and the film was pretty much forgotten. Still, in light of the career to come, Black Gold is clearly an important part of Quinn's filmography because it definitely gave somebody -- Quinn himself or others who watched the thing -- an enduring idea of what Anthony Quinn was supposed to be on screen.

DVR Diary: BRITISH AGENT (1934)

R. H. Bruce Lockhart had a dramatic diplomatic career that became the makings of a movie drama when he published his Memoirs of a British Agent in 1932. Warner Bros. bought the film rights and had Laird Doyle write a script for Michael Curtiz to direct. Lockhart had been sent to the new Soviet Union in 1918 on a forlorn mission to keep the Bolshevik state in the war against Germany. He was eventually arrested and accused of conspiring to kill V. I. Lenin, only to be released in a spy exchange. Needless to say, Warners elaborated on this. In real life, Lockhart fell for the widow of a Russian diplomat of the old regime. Not dramatic enough. Why not have the movie Lockhart, called "Stephen Locke" (Leslie Howard) fall in love with a revolutionary instead? Star-crossed lovers and all that. So Locke meets cute with Elena (Kay Francis) when she strays onto diplomatic property trying to escape a Cossack she'd shot at during a riot. Since she's a revolutionary, why not make her part of the government after the Revolution takes place? That way she can be torn between her love for Locke and her love for her country and its new government. Thus she betrays his confidence as he negotiates with the Soviet leaders by letting them know that he has no actual authority to fulfill promises made to them. Events gallop beyond his control anyway; "the Soviet" concludes a peace with Germany and the British land troops in Russia to spark a counterrevolution. As in life, Lenin is shot, though for dramatic purposes he is more gravely injured, falling into a coma. As the arch-revolutionary fights for his life, his cohorts call for harsh measures -- "call it terror if you will," one says -- to suppress the White armies of the counterrevolution. Locke and his diplomatic buddies -- a gum-chewing American (William Gargan), a card-sharp Italian (Cesar Romero) and a young Frenchman (whoever) -- are trying to smuggle arms to the Whites, but the net is tightening. The non-anglophones are shot down and the American is captured and tortured. He won't give up Locke, but Elena convinces him to tell her so she can tip Locke off. Instead, she resolves the contradictions of her career by ratting Locke out, but meeting him in advance of the attack so she can die with him. But wait! At the last possible moment, Lenin wakes from his coma. Lenin will live! And his first words upon waking are "Stop the terror!"

You heard me. It'd be a moment of high camp if so many people wouldn't refuse to find it funny. It exemplifies the way British Agent bends over backwards to be evenhanded in its account of the Bolshevik Revolution. It's really an apolitical film -- certainly an unideological one. The Bolsheviks aren't recognizably "totalitarian" here; the movie takes their demands for peace and bread for the poor at face value, which is fair to a certain extent. One reason for the delicate approach may have been that some of the participants were still living. That requires some name changes. Instead of Alexander Kerensky, the Provisional Government that ruled between the fall of the Tsar and the Bolshevik coup is led in the movie by a fictional "Kolinov." J. Carroll Naish is easily identifiable by his fake hair as Leon Trotsky, also living in 1934, but his character is referred to only as "Commissioner for War." A couple of characters look like Josef Stalin, but no one is called by that name. So it's not quite the Russian Revolution we've grown familiar with in more than one sense. A difference in attitude would come shortly, as you can tell by comparing British Agent with Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka, released five years later. That film, a product of European imagination (Billy Wilder wrote it), famously portrays Soviet Woman as de-sexed, humorless, nearly soulless, someone who sacrifices her humanity, or at least her femininity, for ideology's sake. Kay Francis, however, is no Greta Garbo. Her Elena is passionate, violent (at least initially) and incorrigibly romantic. There's no suggestion that she's had to sacrifice her womanly nature to fight for the revolution or help govern the new state. If she seems unconvincing in her role, -- and she doesn't really live up to her first gun-toting appearance -- she's probably more so now than when the movie came out, as long as the emotionless-Commie archetype still prevails. The more romantic idea of a revolutionary still had an audience before Stalin gave revolutionaries in general a bad name. British Agent may be seen as an artifact of a more naive time -- that "stop the terror" line can only inspire bitter laughter from those who know their history -- but it's essentially a film about a revolution, not the tyranny that followed. In keeping with the anti-war mood of the Pre-Code era when the film was made,-- it was released under the Code Enforcement regime in the fall of 1934 -- the film can't get too worked up over the Soviet refusing to stay in that stupid war, and who can blame it? In any event, all those issues don't amount to a hill of beans compared to the love of two people, which shows that, despite its vaunted sophistication, Pre-Code was a simpler time in some ways after all.
Warners (here using their First National alias -- check out that FN shield!) insisted on calling Lockhart's book a novel. Here's how they pitched British Agent to 1934 audiences, as preserved by the ever-reliable TCM. com.

DVR Diary: THE GOLDEN ARROW (La freccia d'oro, 1962)

It took five credited writers to give Antonio Margheriti something to film while he had the services of fast-declining star Tab Hunter -- who as it happened, had already filmed an episode of his short-lived TV series with the "Golden Arrow" title -- but more than five writers deserve credit for what we see on screen. Add to the official list of five Italian scribes the names of Lotta Woods, Achmed Abdullah and Douglas Fairbanks Sr., since La freccia d'oro is for the most part a remake of Fairbanks's epic fantasy, Raoul Walsh's The Thief of Bagdad. In short, a rogue with a noble heart competes with three princes, one an unscrupulous conqueror, for the hand of a princess. While the rogue embarks on a quest, the princess tasks the princes with finding the rarest of treasures. They find what their counterparts found in 1924: a crystal ball, a flying carpet and a magic cure-all. The most militant of the princes conspires to take Damascus and the princess, but our hero saves the day with his own hard-won magic. Instead of a winged horse, the Thief of Damascus, clean-shaven Hassan (Hunter) has the title weapon, briefly at first and more decisively later. He wins it initially as the one contestant who can pull a heavy bow -- it's apparently a birthright -- but loses it because he meant to use it for selfish purposes. His quest to retrieve it is his atonement for various deadly sins of attitude. He has help, in this film's major deviation from the Fairbanks story, in the form of three comedy-relief genii, one old and bossy, one rather stupid and clumsy, the third rotund but otherwise nondescript.  They ground the Italian fantasy (which wasn't released in the U.S. until 1964, by which time Hunter's stardom had dimmed still further) as a kiddie picture and finally subvert whatever chance Margheriti and an ambitious art-direction and effects team to make a fantasy film worthy of its American model.

Margheriti took a long time shooting La freccia -- a contemporary news report marked six months that Hunter had spent on the production -- and the locations were worth the time spent locating them. A lot of the film was shot in Egypt at authentic ruins that give the picture just the sense of epic grandeur it needs without spending too much money on sets. When sets and effects are needed Margheriti's team goes to town. The highlight of their work is a hair-raising scene when Hassan visits an underground kingdom, is condemned by its queen for trespassing, and is chased by men on fire. Throughout, art director Flavio Mogherini and set designer Massimo Tavazzi keep things vivid and lavish. They still try hard when they fall short; their flying-carpet effects aren't much of an advance over Walsh's work and they end up skipping what seemed to be set up as the film's big finish: a fight between carpet-borne enemies. They're at their worst when the film becomes most childish. In the Fairbanks Thief of Baghdad, the hero summons an armed multitude to fend off the villains' attack. In Golden Arrow Hassan can use his weapon to dismantle the enemy's weapons, from bows to catapaults, and to tear a flying carpet apart in strips, but most of the damage is done by the three comedy genii, who rout the invaders by gathering up a lot of ash-filled urns and dropping them on soldiers' heads. While we see impressive airborne shots of two armies clashing, the hero and his buddies turn the tide without killing anyone. Even the evil prince and his traitorous ally are dispatched by dumping them into a pool of oil once their flying carpet goes to pieces. We leave them trashing about in frustration; whether anyone bothers to capture them remains a mystery.

Add Gabor Pogany and Giovanni Raffaldi's cinematography to the mix and Golden Arrow is nearly always ravishing to look at in a proper widescreen presentation. Listening to it is another story. Hunter didn't stick around to dub in his own dialogue, and the usual flat dub work by voice actors overfamiliar from countless peplum movies deprives the film of much of the verve and flamboyance it needs. The same goes for Mario Nascimbene's score, likewise overfamiliar in its repetition of too-familiar peplum motifs.  A lot of trouble was taken to finally make this picture sound like just another imported B movie. Margheriti might have been better off had he, like Douglas Fairbanks, made a silent film. Instead, Golden Arrow is an often attractive spectacle that ends up being less than meets the eye.

TCM showed it last week, and TCM has the trailer -- now so do you.

DVR Diary: LA BANDIDA (1963)

Pedro Armendariz and Emilio Fernandez are probably two of the most recognizable Mexican actors for American movie fans. Armendariz, the "Clark Gable of Mexico," broke into Hollywood in the late 1940s with the patronage of John Ford, acting alongside John Wayne in 3 Godfathers and Fort Apache, and remained busy as a character actor in American films until his cancer-provoked suicide, his last film being From Russia With Love. He continued to work in Mexico regularly throughout this period, and La Bandida is his final Mexican film. Fernandez, "El Indio," is best known to American fans as Mapache, the brutal warlord who employs and is destroyed by The Wild Bunch. Despite a personal history of violence, he was a popular star and director in Mexico for most of his life. Acting alongside these mighty men in Bandida is Katy Jurado, an Academy Award nominee for 1954's Broken Lance and a noteworthy presence in American westerns from High Noon through Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. All three, as the poster to the left shows quite clearly, are vastly subordinate to the actual star of Roberto Rodriguez's melodrama, yet Maria Felix is a nonentity to American movie fans. Unlike the others, Felix never went north to Hollywood. She was apparently content to reign as a diva of Mexican cinema, and Bandida is very much a diva's vehicle however you slice it. You may feel elegiac watching a moribund Armendariz and a going-on-sixty Fernandez, but the overall impression Bandida makes is as if Ride the High Country had been written by Mae West and directed (on the cheap) by Josef von Sternberg, with the gunfights replaced by cockfights. Yes, "we will speak more of cocks," as Armendariz says in a subtitle, as an already certainly unsubtle picture is made even less so in translation.

We meet Armendariz's Herrera and Fernandez's Gomez in mortal combat. Herrera's a northerner and a Villista, Gomez a southerner and a Zapatista. For some reason they're fighting each other, the two jefes dueling with machetes (the sound effects seem to have been dubbed in years later) when Herrera runs out of ammo until the official army makes them break it up. Threatened briefly with execution for insubordination, both men are paroled and sent home, Gomez to mourn his wife, who died protecting a rooster, Herrera to discover his beloved, Maria la Bandida, in bed with another man. He shoots the man but spares the woman and goes off to sulk. In time, Gomez comes north to pit his fighting cocks against all comers. He resumes his rivalry with Herrera on friendly terms, especially after gunning down a cardsharp whom Herrera had accused of cheating. Herrera is a pretty tense guy, since his neighborhood's one social spot, a brothel, is where La Bandida holds court with her BFF, Jarocha (Jurado). Bandida is the local celebrity, the subject of songs and universal male lust, to Herrera's chagrin. She gradually takes over the place, ready to enforce her will with a broken bottle whenever necessary. She warms up to Gomez, seemingly to stoke Herrera's jealousy. When interlopers feed his fighting cock buckshot to weigh him down, Gomez assumes that the jealous Herrera has cheated him and a gunfight breaks out in the cockpit. Neither mortally wounded, they recover in adjacent beds, Herrera annoyed by Gomez's insistence on having one of his cocks with him in the hospital. Recovered, Herrera resumes his love-hatred of Bandida, their relationship climaxing when he whips her, beds her, and dumps her again. Still, he can't stand the idea of Gomez scoring with her on the rebound, so he challenges his fellow cocksman to a game of Russian Roulette to determine the rights to Bandida. It ends up a draw when the gun inexplicably fails to fire when Gomez has to take the last shot. The implausibility of this drives Herrera's faithful retainer (and Jarocha's boyfriend) Anselmo (Ignacio Lopez Tarso) out of his wits, literally, after he starts compulsively playing with the weapon. Mercifully, a revolution breaks out again, but that won't stop that "pair of centaurs," as one singer calls them, from staging one more showdown with guns that actually fire....

Armendariz and Fernandez's macho rivalry often seems but a sideshow to Maria Felix's fashion show and her emotive showcases. This shabby vehicle -- it seems to have been tampered with in the preservation somewhat -- is a peon's fantasy of living large in Mexico's equivalent of Wild West days, a woman's fantasy specifically of tough guys battling over the beautiful temptress. The problem is that Felix, like her two male leads, is past her prime, pushing 50 when the film came out. Her options look promising if you like your heroes beefy and burly, but it really seems like everyone should be at least a generation younger for this story to work as something other than camp. For what it's worth, Fernandez comes off better as the more calm and reasonable of the two heroes, while Armendariz is practically apoplectic, raging in one scene, braying like a jackass in another. I've liked Armendariz in most of his American films that I've seen, but he's pretty bad here. I blame that partly on his illness and mainly on bad direction from Rodriguez, who brings little style to this overlit, zoom-happy picture. In everyone's defense, La Bandida does seem designed to be an over-the-top picture, the kind where a singer bursts into the cockpit before one of the big fights to sing a ballad in honor of the title character, who basks in the adulation. It's all hokey as heck and should have seemed primitive thirty or forty years earlier, but even its camp value will be compromised for some viewers by the cockfighting scenes, which seem as important to this movie as the wrestling bits are in El Santo's films. I recorded this off TCM last night expecting some classic of Mexican cinema, though the 1.5 star cable-guide rating should have warned me otherwise. It proved a disappoint I can only laugh off slightly, since all the stars -- I give Felix the benefit of the doubt -- were capable of better, and Armendariz should have gotten a better sendoff in his homeland. Still, some people will have a good time laughing at this -- you can probably decide for yourself from my synopsis -- and to them I recommend it.

DVR Diary: SHOPWORN (1932)

Nick Grinde's Columbia picture is an almost perfect instance of a movie condemning itself in its very title. Shopworn? Let me count the ways. Barbara Stanwyck plays Kitty Lane, a good little waitress in a college-town diner who spends her time fending off the students until she falls for medical student David Livingstone (a stiff Regis Toomey) -- Dr. Livingstone, I presume? Kitty aspires to David's intellectual level, memorizing dictionary pages in order to provide edifying conversation. But David's high-society mother takes Kitty for a gold-digger. She sends her crony the local judge to offer Kitty $5,000 in get-out-of-town money, telling her that David's already left town, the mother having feigned a stroke -- the kind that requires an Atlantic crossing for specialist care -- to distract the lad. Kitty nobly throws the cash in the judge's face. When the judge tries the other direction, telling David that Kitty took the money and ran, Young Dr. Livingstone socks him one. But the judge is a power in the town, and he manages to frame Kitty on a public morals charge that earns her a stint in a home for "the Reformation of Women." This reformation consists of scrubbing floors on your knees until you pass out, and little else that we see. Freed at last, Kitty loses her job, though her co-worker Dot the dishwasher (Zasu Pitts) remains a pal, and David is long gone. What's a girl to do? Kitty fatefully spies a "Follies" poster and shazam! -- if you'll excuse the anachronism -- five years later she is an international star, with her own variety show and Dot playing her maid, and a godsend to the gossip columns. Her latest tour comes to the old college town, where she plans to show up Dave, but the old sparks rekindle. Once more Mom struggles to put out the flames, going so far as to pull a gun on Kitty to make her give Dave up once and for all. But the poor dear is just afraid. She loves her boy and doesn't want anything bad to happen to him. Come to think of it, Kitty feels the same way, so when Dave comes knocking, she hides Mrs. L in a closet and gives her man the big brush-off. He's just about to storm off for good when the old biddy bursts out to dissuade him. Having seen Kitty lie about not loving him just for her sake, she realizes at last that, notwithstanding the last five years, Kitty's been a good girl all along. And they all lived happily ever after.

Newspaper publicity still of Barbara Stanwyck, Zasu Pitts and Regis Toomey.

Barbara Stanwyck would seem to have had as good a track record as any Pre-Code star, shuttling between Columbia assignments for Frank Capra and high-powered stuff like Night Nurse and Baby Face for Warners. But she couldn't work for Capra all the time, and given her rapid rise to stardom both Columbia and Warners stuffed her into as many vehicles as possible. The more that Turner Classic Movies and on-demand DVD stores mine the depths of both studios' archives, the lower Stanwyck's hit average will sink, though it shouldn't sink too far. TCM thought it had something to show off in Shopworn, playing it in prime time to open a four-film marathon of Stanwyck Pre-Codes, but the film is hopeless. Toomey is an inert male lead; it would take alchemy, not chemistry, for sparks to strike between him and Stanwyck. But a more charismatic actor probably could not have saved the, well, shopworn scenario (concocted by Capra cohorts Jo Swerling and Robert Riskin) and its catalogue of corny climaxes. Fortunately, Hollywood knew how to be brief in those days, so you lose little more than an hour of your life sitting through Shopworn. Movie fans probably should find a film like it to watch sometime, if only to remind themselves that not everything in the Pre-Code era was scintillating, relevant or even interesting. Content and context can redeem a lot of Pre-Code crap, but not every time. For a film about scandal, Shopworn talks a good game -- I close in a generous mood -- but doesn't walk the walk. With Stanwyck there to walk it for them, that should prove what a stinker Shopworn is.

Bonus material: An enterprising exhibitor in Regina, Saskatchewan, convinced local merchants to stage tie-in "Shopworn" sales to promote the movie. Here's  a page worth of publicity from one of the Regina newspapers.

 

DVR Diary: CAPTURED! (1933)

Roy Del Ruth's POW drama for Warner Bros. isn't the typical anti-war story you might expect in 1933, when cynicism about the last Great War was near its height. Nor is Captured! a pro-war film or patriotic in any way, since its heroes are British. If anything, Edward Chodorov's adaptation of a Philip Gibbs story suggests that the problem with war isn't war itself, but the warriors. War itself can be a very orderly, almost civilized affair, depending on who wages it. If you're a British POW like Capt. Allison (Leslie Howard), and your new camp commandant (Paul Lukas) just happens to be an Oxford man, confinement can be almost bearable. It wasn't at first. An impromptu escape attempt results in Allison's men being locked in a cellar for weeks. They nearly go stir crazy, growing impatient with each other's company -- the banter between a Texan and a Cockney is hard to bear -- before Allison prevails upon the new commandant's regard for humanity and makes himself responsible for the men's conduct.  Of course, some of the prisoners, like the bug-eyed, barely articulate Strogin (John Bliefer) seem to have lost it even before they were captured. But what bothers Allison most isn't his loss of freedom but the fact that he hasn't gotten a letter from his wife (Margaret Lindsay). He can at least expect information about her when their mutual friend Digby (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) ends up in camp after getting shot down. But Digby is strangely reticent on the subject and soon grows all too eager to escape. We soon learn why, though Allison remains in the dark about the fact that his wife started an affair with Digby almost as soon as Allison went to war. Digby's primary motive for escaping is that he can't bear proximity to the man he cuckolded. So he bolts despite Allison's warnings, seizes a plane from a nearby airfield and flies back to the Allied lines. That same night, a local woman who brought produce to the camp is found raped and murdered just outside the gates, and Digby's abandoned coat is found nearby.

For the Germans, the rape and murder matter more than a prisoner's escape. Under the prevailing laws of war, they have a right to demand that the Allies deliver Digby back to captivity to stand trial for the girl's violation. The commandant wants Allison to undersign the formal demand as proof of everyone's good-faith commitment to justice, but our hero can't imagine Digby doing such a terrible thing. Why do they think Digby did it, anyway? Well, they did find his coat, and it did have letter addressed to him inside. The commandant shows Allison the letters for verification purposes, and now Allison learns the truth about Digby and his wife. You bet your ass he signs that document now. And in the most surreal scene in the picture, the laws of war are observed to the letter. Damned if the British don't hustle Digby back to the front and march him into No Man's Land under a flag of truce. Damned if the Germans don't accept him like a Red Cross package while sharing a quick smoke with the Tommies escorting the prisoner. Then it's back to the war and back to prison for Digby, where his denials of having even seen a girl do him little good. The only thing that saves him from the firing squad is the wretched Strogin's handwritten confession to Allison, punctuated by his hanging himself and topped with a lovely Pre-Code closeup of his bug-eyed strangled face.

The prison still isn't big enough for Allison and Digby, and that means another escape attempt is inevitable. This time, however, it's a mass breakout, the men to storm the airfield and fly out en masse. For the plan to work, someone will have to take control of a machine-gun tower and hold the guards at bay. It's dueling renunciation time as Digby believes himself worthy of death for betraying Allison, while Allison has convinced himself that Digby is his wife's true love and the one who should go home to her. I won't spoil who ends up with the machine-gun, but it ends with a fair amount of carnage and the commandant's salute to an honorable enemy.

All of the picture's violence, apart from the initial escape attempt, is motivated by the passions and jealousies of men. War, by comparison, or at least away from the battlefield, is an almost absurdly orderly affair, always subject to pauses for proper transactions like the delivery of one's own fighting man to the enemy. A POW camp can be just as civilized under the combined influence of Allison and the commandant, until the wild card of Digby and his guilty secret disrupts the decorum. It's as if he triggers the savage impulses of Strogin -- as if Digby's escape and Strogin's murder of the girl were not coincidental. Digby and Allison can't resolve the issue between them without a massive battle and the deaths of who knows how many people. The thought of Allison and Digby fighting each other never really seems to occur to either man; they take their rivalry out on the Germans instead. Gibbs and Chodorov may be saying something very provocative about war here -- or they may not have had a clue about the implications of their story. Either way, Captured! is one of the more peculiar POW movies ever made, setbound for the most part but stylishly so in a big-studio way until the big breakout as hundreds of men swarm across open ground like the release of something fundamentally male. As Allison, Leslie Howard seems to be playing his standard role, while Fairbanks Jr. gives one of his typical edgy, slightly feral performances from the period when he tried harder as an actor. As Strogin, Bliefer lurks at the fringes often enough to remind us of his ticking-bomb status, and his mostly-mute mugging is such that you hardly notice J. Carroll Naish hanging around until he gets more lines late in the picture. You probably don't actually need Margaret Lindsay in the picture, but she's here to nail down the heart interest in some flashbacks. As an ultimate good German, Lukas has little to do but be reasonable when no one else will. His commandant is the warrior as administrator, a well-meaning bureaucrat who hopes to cope with soldiers but can't contain men. So is war hell because it weaponizes male rivalry, or would guys be better off under military discipline as long as that included leaving each other's women alone? Captured! doesn't necessarily offer any answers, but it does raise some interesting questions.
Given that the trailer promises "Ten thousand love-starved men storming the barricades that bar them from the world of women," I now think this film knew quite well what it was saying. Here's the trailer, provided as usual with Warners Pre-Codes by TCM.com

DVR Diary: NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET (1931)

W. S. "Woody" Van Dyke was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's specialist in exotica dating back to 1928's White Shadows in the South Seas, a silent film that portrayed Polynesian folk as Edenic innocents corrupted by the "white shadow" of the civilized world's greed. Van Dyke carried on in exotic mode into the talkie and Pre-Code era, most memorably as the director of Johnny Weissmuller's debut as Tarzan the Ape Man. That film has a somewhat different idea of the un-"civilized" world from that of White Shadows, and so does the Peter B. Kyne story -- he also authored 3 Godfathers -- Van Dyke directed from an adaptation by three screenwriters. Itself a remake of a lost 1925 silent directed by Maurice Tourneur, Never the Twain Shall Meet is just about the polar opposite from White Shadows, since it's the story of Polynesian culture corrupting a civilized white man. Corruption comes in the form of Tamea (Conchita Montenegro), a half-breed daughter of a white ship captain and a Polynesian princess. The princess is dead and the captain is leprous and suicidal when he brings his latest cargo, including Tamea, to San Francisco, where he entrusts the cargo and the daughter to Dan Pritchard (Leslie Howard) and promptly jumps overboard to his death. Given Howard's presence, movie buffs probably can't help anticipating a Pygmalion approach to the material as the somewhat uptight trader welcomes the nearly wild girl into his mansion. She speaks English just about adequately, plays a wicked concertina, but isn't quite comfortable in American clothes. She assumes that "Daniel Pritchard," as she always calls him, is meant to be her mate, and her demands for his physical attention -- she won't agree to dress for a social evening unless he kisses her -- complicates Dan's relationship with his frosty fiancee (Karen Morley). Dan's indulgent and forgiving of Tamea's innocent aggression and grows increasingly defensive as the fiancee and his own father (C. Aubrey Smith) increasingly disapprove of the island girl. When the elder Pritchard finally arranges to have Tamea shipped back to her home, Dan rebels against convention and follows her to the island, which proves anything but paradise for him.

Dan doesn't care for the food or the way the natives eat it. He cares less for the other whites on the island, especially the alcoholic beachcomber (Clyde Cook) who predicts ruin like his own for Dan. Worst of all, Tamea proves hopelessly promiscuous, running off with handsome island boys at every opportunity but still expecting Dan to love her. Her apparently instinctual infidelity demoralizes Dan until he becomes a dirty, drunken beachcomber just as predicted. First disgusted by Tamea's conduct, he vows to quit the island, but Tamea solves the problem by inviting him to beat her. "Beat me but don't hate me," she pleads in the Pre-Code Play of the Film, "Beat me or you will hate me!" Dan takes a few whacks that have the desired effect, one presumes, on both people, and so things go until his old fiancee shows up on the island to see what's become of him. She finds Dan drunk and defensive, still insisting that he can leave any time he feels like it. Very well then, she says -- she'll go back to San Francisco and wait for him. She can do nothing but wait, she reminds him, because there can only ever be one man for her. The contrast with Tamea is like a cold shower to our hero, who resists all further temptation from Tamea, cleans up, packs his bag and departs on the same boat as his true love, going so far as to drag his fellow white man, the beachcomber, kicking and screaming on board for redemption. Tamea sulkily watches the ship depart, broods a minute or so, and then runs off with the first available boy-toy. The End.

Earlier in the picture, when a friend of Dan's in San Francisco confronts Tamea with the hard fact that the white race shouldn't mingle with others, her indignation and Dan's sympathetic response suggested a brave anti-racist direction for this movie. Boy, was I wrong. If anything, its escalatingly harsh presentation of Tamea makes Never the Twain one of the most bigoted films I've seen from the Pre-Code era. A non-racist reading might have been possible had the film suggested that Tamea was just a nympho or hopelessly starved for male attention, but the hints from the beachcomber that he'd had a similar experience suggest that Tamea is really just a typical mindlessly promiscuous island girl. The contrast between Tamea and Dan's selflessly faithful fiancee reinforces the assumption of the era that non-whites or "primitive" people were incapable of living according to any ideal higher than instant gratification of appetites. Somehow this situation never arises in the more "noble savage" fantasies like White Shadows or Bird of Paradise. In those pictures it's assumed that a white man can find a true, albeit doomed love in the islands. Never the Twain is just as much a fantasy, but it's much nastier and not very convincing. Howard is his usual cool customer and lacks much chemistry with the Spaniard Montenegro, who plays Tamea less like an island siren and more like a bratty child. It must be added that, in retrospect, there's simply nothing seductive about dancing with a concertina. The childish aspect of Montenegro's performance is in keeping with the era's assumption that aboriginal people were "just children," and both the performance and the assumption make Never the Twain a childish film. It's one of those films that make an enthusiasm for Pre-Code cinema occasionally embarrassing.

DVR Diary: VIOLENT ROAD (1958)

William Friedkin's Sorceror is the best-known American remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's classic road thriller The Wages of Fear, but Howard W. Koch's B-movie is the uncredited first. Don Martin didn't claim to base his story, nor Richard H. Landau his screenplay, on the French film from a few years earlier, but come on, people. A disparate group of drifters and losers haul explosive cargo across dangerous terrain. Please. This time it's rocket fuel, which has to move with a test base after a launch goes bad and the missile crashes into a school. If Violent Road is one part Wages of Fear, it's also part noir. The most noirish thing about it is that, unlike in Wages of Fear, the drifters and losers don't have to leave their own country to have their dangerous adventure. Noir is arguably a looking-inward after World War II closed off most of the possibilities for adventuresome exile in exotic parts. There's no going away to forget for Violent Road's protagonists. Probably the best adjusted of them is top-billed Brian Keith's hard-boiled drifter. Others include a broken-down veteran who never adjusted to civilian life, a young man hoping to redeem his alcoholic ex-football hero brother, and a rocket technician who lost his wife and daughter in the disaster. Tempers are nearly as combustible as the cargo, but Violent Road never really ignites the way a Wages knockoff should. The actors, including Dick Foran as the sarge and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as the rocket man, do what they can with their roles, but Koch (who got his start as a director collaborating with Edmond O'Brien on Shield For Murder) doesn't deliver the jolts. On the most literal level, to spoil things a bit, none of the trucks goes boom. I don't know if that's a Code-dictated copout or if Koch couldn't spring for an exploding truck. Instead, he offers perils in the form of minor rockslides -- one of the crew saves a truck by drop-kicking a boulder to change its course -- and an out-of-control school bus crossing the convoy's path. Not everyone makes it, I must admit, but when your one fatality results from chemical burns to someone's hand, you're not really operating on Wages's level of intensity. There's decent location work and stunt driving throughout, but someone unaware of Wages's influence on this film would probably feel very little sense of peril, since most of the suspense I felt came from expectations based on my awareness of the source material. No set piece in this picture comes close to the tension of the bridge scenes in either Wages or Sorceror. In fact, the Violent Road convoy never crosses a bridge with anything at stake. That may be another failure of budget or simply a failure of nerve. The first half hour of the picture seems to set up a worthy imitation of the original, but the talent runs out of gas long before the trucks reach their destination.

DVR Diary: WE'RE IN THE MONEY (1935)

As a team, Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell were sometimes known as "the Gimme Girls." In the Pre-Code era, they were Warner Bros.'s apex predators in the gold-digger category. Since they were apparently a popular pair, the challenge for Warners was how to keep them doing their thing in the era of Code Enforcement from 1934 forward. Frequent co-star Hugh Herbert was put to work (in his writerly identity of "F. Hugh Herbert") contriving a story; he shares the script credit and gets third billing in Ray Enright's picture. How to keep the girls chasing men? Make them process servers working for Herbert's law firm. That way they can infiltrate male sanctuaries with feminine wiles or simply storm in with their characteristic brazenness, as when they invade a men-only steamroom to serve a subpoena early in the show. Blondell's character is tiring of the racket, however, and wants to settle down with her chauffeur boyfriend (Ross Alexander), but Farrell eggs her into taking on one more big job for a big payday. They have to serve papers on three diverse cronies of a young millionaire being sued for breach of promise by Claire La Claire, Herbert's client, who lapses in and out of a French accent depending on her temper. The girls' targets are a sort of gangster (Lionel Stander), a nightclub singer (vocalist Phil Regan playing an approximation of himself) and a professional wrestler (Brooklyn-born "Kentucky Hillbilly" Man-Mountain Dean playing himself in no uncertain terms). All these big brave men are fleeing from "supeenies" requiring them to testify against their millionaire pal C. Richard Courtney, who has his own strategy for avoiding legal papers. It may not surprise readers to learn that his method is to travel as his own liveried chauffeur, in which role he has fallen in love with Blondell without knowing her work, while she has no inkling that her boyfriend "Carter" is subpoena target number one.

Since Blondell and Farrell have to tone down their sex appeal under the new Hollywood rules, Herbert and Enright pad We're In the Money with extended slapstick sequences. As a result, we get to see Man Mountain Dean, who worked his way into becoming Hollywood's go-to rassler in this period, in his squared-circle element. He wrestles "Chief Pontiac, the Indian Marvel" (Chief Little Wolf) in a charming scene highlighting the behavior of pro-wrestling audiences in the 1930s. Pontiac is the babyface in this match, and our heroines join in rooting for him by going "woo-woo-woo" in supposed Indian style. They heckle Dean as Pontiac struggles to pin him and finally end up with the big man in their laps when the Chief tosses him out of the ring. Since they need him to verify his identity, they advise the dazed grappler that the best way to come to is to recall his name and other personal details. His identity confirmed (for story purposes his legal name is "Man Mountain Dean."), the girls hand him a "good luck note" as he climbs back into the ring. Once he finds out it's a "supeeny" he hulks up and destroys Pontiac while the audience, joining in on the joke, showers him with papers of all sorts. In the other slapstick setpiece Blondell, Farrell and Herbert pursue Alexander's yacht in a speedboat that none of them really know how to steer. There's actually some quite effective process work in this bit, especially when the car speeds through the shadows beneath a pier. Taking the initiative, Blondell jumps from the boat into the drink so Alexander's crew will rescue her. The lovers bristle when they discover each other's impostures and Alexander throws Blondell back into the ocean. He thinks better of it, but the indignant Blondell finally dives in once more -- and this time the camera is close enough to show us that Blondell herself took the dive.

The plot plays out in familiar farcical fashion, with Alexander checkmating Herbert and spiting Blondell by agreeing to marry Claire La Claire, thus clearing himself of breach-of-promise. Once it becomes clear that a key piece of evidence against Alexander was doctored, there's a last mad dash to the rescue to prevent his marrying the real gold-digger of the picture. In the end, We're In the Money succeeds somewhat in perpetuating the good-natured aggression that defined the Blondell-Farrell team while toning it down by emphasizing Blondell's longing for domesticity. Herbert seems somewhat out of place as an unlikely infantile lawyer, a nut comic in the screwball era, but he does get his laughs and deserves some credit as a writer for his effort to solve the puzzle of carrying Blondell-Farrell into the Code Enforcement era. Enright keeps things moving and that's about as much as we could ask of him. Blondell and Farrell teamed twice more afterward, the last time being, appropriately enough, Gold Diggers of 1937.  Could they have kept the act going longer without Code Enforcement? Hard to say, since they'd still have gotten older, but Money hints that the Gimme Girls could have adapted to changing times quite nicely, though preferably with somewhat better material.

TCM's trailer seems cut down a bit, but notice the mockery of their own picture G-Men, the "Cagney reforms" picture -- as if to say the "G-Girls" haven't reformed at all.

DVR Diary: TURN BACK THE CLOCK (1933)

The Great Depression must have left many people wondering what they would have done differently before the great crash, had they a chance. A fantasy story in which one man gets the chance, even if only in his dream, had natural potential in 1933. The comic potential is obvious, too, and that's why we have Lee Tracy starring in Edgar Selwyn's film, co-written by the director with ace scripter Ben Hecht. Selwyn counts as a singular Pre-Code fantasist for making this picture as well as the future-war prophecy film Men Must Fight, in which he visualizes the bombing of New York City. Tracy plays Joe Gimlett, who's struggling through the Depression running a cigar store and doing better than many. He and his wife have a few thousand dollars salted away, When an old buddy made good invites him to invest in a business proposition that could make him $20,000 in a year, Joe's wife vetoes the idea. Frustrated with his lack of progress in life, Joe dreams himself back into his past under anaesthesia after a car accident. Anticipating Peggy Sue Got Married, Tracy inhabits his younger self circa 1910, which makes for some cute initial confusion between Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. Discovering that he seems to have a fresh chance, Joe accepts a business proposition he'd rejected in his past past and marries the vivacious girl who would have become his rich friend's wife, the friend marrying Joe's real-time wife instead. Joe is able to exploit his foreknowledge to some extent -- he strikes it rich by investing in trucking at the start of World War I -- but at other times his predictions and warnings only make him look crazy. Audiences in the last days of Prohibition would certainly laugh when Joe, noticing the open abundance of alcohol, talks about bootleggers and speakeasies to universal incomprehension. The fish-out-of-water angle becomes most bizarre, in retrospect, when Joe heckles some musicians performing at his wedding reception for singing old-fashioned songs. The singers are the unbilled Larry Fine and Moe and Jerry Howard -- the Three Stooges unaccompanied by Ted Healy, and the weird thing about their one scene in the picture is the way they play complete straight men for Tracy, baffled by his requests for songs as yet unwritten. Moe and Larry have tamed their signature hair into period styles, and none of the Stooges do anything characteristic -- no slapping or insults of any kind. This must have been the sort of work that made Columbia Pictures appealing to them.

Anyway, Turn Back the Clock acquires some bite whenever Joe gets to play a Cassandra, though you get the sense that Tracy could have attacked the material more strongly. A scene where he addresses recruits bound for the World War that he fought in his past/real life seems set up for an anti-war tirade, but Joe only offers a mild debunking of patriotic cliches, warning the troops to expect mud and cooties but also promising them their own private bonus from the local bank -- a telling promise when real veterans still hoped for early bonuses from the government. His ability to change history is thwarted by an often self-righteous and more often crazy-sounding foreknowledge; appointed head of war industries by President Wilson, he's fired shortly before the armistice for protesting too much against profiteering. Striking even closer to home for Depression audiences, Joe warns people against investing in the stock market, even though he doesn't remember the exact day of the Crash. The story seems to have come full circle when he simultaneously warns his dream wife against playing the market while making essentially the same invitation to his pal, who now has Joe's original place (and wife) in the cigar store, that was made to him. But the dream Depression is even worse than reality for our hero, whose wife had invested their entire savings in the market behind his back and whose bank board is setting him up to take the fall for their shady practices. He dreams all the way to the starting point of the picture -- the Bank Holiday of March 1933, immediately following FDR's inauguration -- and realizes to his horror that he can't predict the future anymore. Dream becomes nightmare at last as he tries to flee the country, is captured by police who form a firing squad and then a lynch mob -- but as you might have guessed, death is but a prelude to awakening and the summing up of lessons learned. In its eccentric fashion, Turn Back the Clock belongs to the same category of retrospective "what went wrong" films as William Wellman's Heroes For Sale and Midnight Mary. It's meant to be more lighthearted than either of those doomy films, and Tracy strives hard to milk humor from the fantastic situation, but the implicit message that foreknowledge could not prevent the economic disaster makes the picture somewhat less funny than the studio claimed. It may well have seemed less funny when it came out than it does now, but on the other hand Pre-Code audiences were a hard-boiled lot, we assume, so maybe they got some gallows humor out of it. Since we're more likely to think of this as a fantasy than as a comedy, we may judge it by a different standard that gives Selwyn credit for creativity, if his was as new an idea as the advertising claimed. Apart from its largely unacknowledged place in the history of fantasy cinema, Turn Back the Clock is an item of real historical interest for its commentary on the Depression and the generation before. It may have more historical than entertainment value, but for those who find this sort of history entertaining this picture is definitely worth a look.

Once again TCM comes through with the original trailer, including most of the Stooges' footage.

DVR Diary: SIMBA (1955)

Recent histories of the Mau Mau uprising in 1950s Kenya emphasize the unsavory tactics employed by the British colonial government to keep a restive population under control while suppressing an anti-colonial revolt. In light of the current historical consensus, the 1955 film by Brian Desmond Hurst, best known for the Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol, can't help but seem, on a first judgmental glance, like a racist rationalization of atrocities against a "savage" enemy. That the Mau Mau fighters committed atrocities of their own isn't disputed, but the Hurst film, and still more the advertising for it, sensationalizes Mau Mau violence in a way that can't help triggering politically correct reflexes today, just as many Hollywood tales of Native American uprisings do. Yet while Simba probably couldn't be expected to come out against British rule, it does take a critical stand against widespread racism among the British in Africa. When one white farmer makes the usual arguments describing Africans as "children," the audience isn't meant to approve. We know better because the film shows us proof to the contrary, the heroic Dr. Karanja (Earl Cameron), who struggles to overcome both the condescension of whites and the pressures of family loyalty to make a stand against the often-senseless Mau Mau violence. Yet the film also tempts us to suspect him of secret sympathy, possibly even leadership of the uprising; the nature of the genre probably makes such suspicion inevitable. That suspicion is part of the personal drama of our white protagonist, Alan Howard (Dirk Bogarde), who comes to Kenya to learn that his brother, one of the farmers, has died at Mau Mau hands -- we see his demise in a pre-credit shock sequence. Despite his own loss, Alan initially seems to disapprove of the white settlers' attitude toward the "Cukes," the native Kikuyu people. But as the conflict intensifies and more whites die, he seems adopt an angry racism of his own. A macho subtext to it may be his jealousy of Karanja's close working relationship with Alan's girlfriend Mary (Virgina McKenna), a volunteer nurse. The tragedy of the picture is that Karanja can only seem to prove his bona fides through sacrifice, even after Alan acts to save his life. If Africans like Karanja are as rare as this picture makes them seem, the future won't be very bright -- Simba was released while the uprising was still in progress -- for the Kikuyu child whose pensive face, in massive close-up, is the last thing we see. A lesser tragedy is that Simba is mostly a predictably pedestrian affair. There's something generic in the worst sense in its violence and its earnestness, and the obvious fact that Bogarde did all his acting in a studio, not in Africa, takes most of the life out of the project. Simba will most likely disappoint both action fans and anyone expecting a more critical or questioning account of British colonization. There's a movie to be made about the Mau Mau uprising and the settler experience in the last generation of British rule -- Kenya became independent in 1963 -- but Simba is only a draft of that picture, and probably too close to events to see them as clearly as posterity would like.

DVR Diary: BLACK HAND (1950)

In Little Italy a man meets in secret with a policeman, risking his life to inform on la mano nera, one of the extortion gangs that terrorized Italian-American communities at the turn of the twentieth century. The man describes two individuals who threatened him, only to see them step out of the closet. The dead body in the closet belongs to the cop who's been killed, and whose uniform is now worn by a gang leader (Marc Lawrence) who watches the informant die by the knife. The Knife was the working title of Richard Thorpe's period thriller for M-G-M, a picture whose reputation has suffered due to the presumed-inappropriate casting of Gene Kelly as the initial victim's son, grown up and returned from a sojourn in Italy to seek revenge. True, Kelly is ethnically inappropriate for the role of Johnny Columbo, but those who think him unfit for the material may never have seen his turn as a psychopath in Robert Siodmak's singular noir musical Christmas Holiday. Kelly can do grim, and he does it nicely here in a tense early scene when he plies a mobbed-up bartender with drinks while pumping him for information and promising a later meeting that can not go well. But when he goes to the man's apartment, the bartender is already dead and a cop is waiting for him. J. Carroll Naish plays the policeman largely based on real-life Italian-American crimefighter Joe Petrosino, and the actor, normally nutty with accents and soon to be reviled, so it's said, by real Italians for his stereotyped performance on the Life With Luigi show, does something surprising here. Surrounded by actors doing Italian accents (Kelly isn't one of them), Naish tones down his own mannerisms, opting for more of a tough-guy New Yorker voice with variable hints of accent. His character tries to steer Columbo from the path of vengeance and toward lawful crimefighting through the patient collection of evidence. Together they try to start a citizen's group to combat the Black Hand, but the gangsters give Kelly a savage beating to make an example of him, breaking a leg (as if to signify that there'll be no dancing this time) and leaving him scarfaced for the rest of the movie.

As Kelly recuperates and studies law, Naish increasingly dominates the picture, stating its editorial viewpoint in a heavyhanded courtroom speech as he tries to convince a terrified witness to identify his tormentors. Luther Davis's screenplay actually attempts a sophisticated analysis of immigrant attitudes, asserting that they don't trust the state to protect them because they had no experience in the old country of government looking out for their interests, but adding that American government circa 1908 wasn't really doing all it could have to protect the poor from predators in their midst. Davis's problem is that he puts all of this in Naish's big speech rather than illustrating it through incidents and dialogue. But the picture is a thriller, not a social critique, so it can survive that shortcoming. Kelly reclaims the initiative after Naish is killed in Palermo just as he mails documents identifying certain New Yorkers (including the Lawrence character, now posing as a concerned citizen) as wanted criminals in Sicily. After the Black Hand kidnaps the baby brother of Columbo's girlfriend to intimidate Columbo into surrendering the documents, our hero realizes that he has time, before the package actually arrives, to track down the kidnappers and rescue the boy -- as long as he and his knife can get frightened or stubborn people to talk....

Kelly isn't very convincing as an Italian-American, unless you accept him as a model of assimilation, and his character is written erratically, careening between the paths of law and revenge, but he still makes an effective thriller hero, while Thorpe makes an effective thriller director. He stages several suspenseful sequences of people stalking each other along noirish streets, as well as one brilliant bit when Kelly is clocked over the head with a full, open pail of beer. The beer splashes over the camera lens, quite effectively representing the hero's slide into unconsciousness. Paul Vogel's cinematography is appropriately shadowy and menacing, while the overall production design makes a nice effort at recreating the slum environment on the M-G-M lot. Black Hand is a well-meaning movie intended to honor Italians' Americanization, but some may detect a whiff of McCarthyism (in advance of the Senator's own emergence as a Red-hunter) in its insistence on the need to testify against enemies in our midst. It should have a place in cinema history as an early and earnest attempt (not counting films from the actual period) to portray gangsterism before crime really got organized.

DVR Diary: INSIDE THE MAFIA (1959)

A dramatic sequence of events in the fall of 1957 made the existence of a national Mafia more difficult for public officials to deny. Reports of the barbershop assassination of Albert Anastasia and the police raid on an apparent crime conclave in Apalachin, NY, whetted appetites for more information about the shadowy crime organization. But before Joe Valachi's 1963 testimony before a congressional committee very little was known about the institutions and inner workings of the Mafia. Into the breach stepped the Premium Pictures company, screenwriter Orville H. Hampton and director Edward L. Cahn, who released Inside the Mafia in 1959. Cahn was a Poverty Row visionary with a vast filmography of hackwork and a handful of primitively prescient pictures. His sci-fi film It! The Terror From Beyond Space has been recognized as a precursor of Ridley Scott's Alien, while the mindless marching masses Cahn directed in Creature With the Atom Brain and Invisible Invaders anticipate the zombie attacks of George A. Romero's films. Does Inside the Mafia similarly anticipate The Godfather and the mafia genre that followed Francis Coppola's film? The answer is a flat no. Working apparently from utter ignorance of the actual Mafia, Cahn and Hampton can't hope to approximate the ritual dynamics and familiar intimacy of post-Valachi movies. Instead, Inside is strange not in any premonitory way but as a work of crass naivete, and insulting in its pretense of telling the true story of the events leading to the Apalachin conference. The tone is set from the start when Apalachin is redubbed "Apple Lake," while Anastasia is replaced in the fatal barber chair by one Augie Martello (Ted de Corsia), who does not die, at least not right away. Secreted from an insecure hospital to a safe house, Augie lives to give his blessing to a plan of his lieutenant Tony Ledo (Cameron Mitchell) to take over the entire national crime organization. Ledo's idea is a decapitation strike against the long-exiled mastermind Johnny Lucero (Grant Richards) -- whacking him when his plane lands at the Apple Lake airport. Lucero is an amalgam of real-life boss Vito Genovese and the already-legendary Lucky Luciano, whose stature as an exile longing to return to America haunts a number of postwar crime films. For Ledo's plan to work, he must take control of the little airport. That means taking the man who runs the place and his family hostage, making them operate as if nothing is wrong so as not to alarm Lucero or anyone else. Instead of a Mafia expose, the picture becomes a rip-off of Suddenly, the picture in which Frank Sinatra takes a household hostage so he can shoot the President from their window. The imperiled family and their unlucky friends are a dull lot, but the gangsters are hardly less dull. The often manic Mitchell, here at the tale end of his peak period of Hollywood stardom and on the verge of a more productive sojourn in Europe, brings little to his role, while Robert Strauss (best known as Animal from Stalag 17) contributes most of the violence, including a few karate chops. The plot twists when Ledo learns from the TV that Augie has finally succumbed to his wounds. His plan takes a 180 degree turn; he now intends to convince Lucero that he's the man best qualified to run the organization in Lucero's name. His ploy seems to work, but there are a few twists left in the tale, while the hostages strive to free themselves, knowing that they must die otherwise. Everything ends in an Apple Lake bloodbath that the film claims "actually happened." Don't you believe them. Their claim is as viable as Criswell's at the end of Plan 9 From Outer Space, and their film is far less entertaining from that one. Inside the Mafia is exploitation of the worst time, completely lacking in inspiration and seemingly guided by the assumption that once their title had you hooked, they owed you nothing more. That kind of filmmaking ought to be a crime.

DVR Diary: LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT (1933)

Ladies: proper prison etiquette dictates that you not slap Barbara Stanwyck in the course of your petty disputes, because she will punch you in the face. That's one of the lessons learned in this Warner Bros. collaboration between directors Herbert Bretherton and William Keighley. If Ever in My Heart offered the Pre-Code public a new, goody-good Stanwyck, Ladies They Talk About is the good old bad Stanwyck, the same one that made the now-legendary Baby Face later in 1933. Here she's Nan Taylor, an unrepentant gun moll who puts on an act to give her gang an in at a bank. The gang (led by Lyle Talbot) gets the loot and gets away, but Nan has to stay behind to finish her innocent act. Unfortunately, one of the investigating officers recognizes her as a hardened crook and takes her in. Her looks make her a newspaper cover girl and attract the attention of moral crusader David Slade (Preston S. Foster), who calls for a crackdown on crime from his revival pulpit and on the radio. Turns out he and she are old school chums, she a renegade parson's daughter. He thinks she can reform and appeals for her to be released into his custody, but she makes the mistake of admitting to him what she wouldn't admit to the cops. He promptly rats her out and dooms her to a term in prison. 

Nan's place of confinement sometimes seems more like a girl's dormitory than a women's prison. The convicts are allowed to decorate their rooms as they please -- as long as they don't make an opening to the outside. Nan's fellow cons are an eclectic bunch, from a cigar-smoking butch lesbian who impresses her cellmate with her constant exercise to an aristocratic murderess who thinks of the others, especially a black prisoner named Mustard, as her servants. Playing Mustard, Madame Sul-Te-Wan has a great scene in which she chews out this biddy with a ferocity unusual for a black actress even in this period -- only for the effect to be ruined when a guard frightens Mustard with her pet cockatoo. Nan's main antagonist among the prisoners is Susie (Dorothy Burgess), who has an obsessive crush on David Slade and listens to him on the radio every night. Nan makes trouble for herself by shutting the radio off without permission, since she can't stand the sound of Slade's voice. It's Susie who learns the lesson cited above first hand; Nan floors her with one punch, and afterwards can intimidate her simply by making a fist. Stanwyck is never so close to being a female Cagney and the hard-boiled equal of Warners' gangster stars as she is here.

Slade still pines for Nan and writes her letters that she tears up contemptuously until she finds a way to use him. Learning that Talbot is in jail himself, she works up a plan for a joint breakout, part of which involves using Slade as an unwitting courier of a paper outline for an all-important prison key. Unwittingly enough, Slade mails the letter, but Nan doesn't know that her outside collaborator has himself been arrested. The letter is forwarded to prison and opened by the authorities, exposing the plot. Talbot and a partner are killed making a break, while Nan is doomed to finish her full sentence seething with fresh hatred for Slade, whom she assumes opened the letter and ratted her out himself. Finally free, she plans a mortal revenge, setting up a suspenseful climax that the directors botch. Nan goes to Slade's revival hall with a gun and heads to the anxious bench with the other penitents. It seems as if she intends to shoot him as he blesses her, and the film builds tension nicely as Slade works his way toward her while Susie, freed earlier and now working for Slade, watches with alarm and the chorus sings "Almost Persuaded." The climax should come here, one way or the other -- but the tension starts to dissipate as Slade recognizes Nan and invites her into a private room. It seems like this is what she wanted, because she has a more theatrical revenge in mind, though one not designed for play before a live audience. Her plan is more theatrical because it's more corny. She shows Slade a photograph of herself with Talbot and the other dead con, neither of whom the reformer knows. But she wants him to know that they're the reason why he's going to die. Suspicious Susie eavesdrops through a keyhole but does and says nothing until Nan has levelled her weapon and fired. Then she runs for help while Nan, her violent passion spent, immediately repents of wounding Slade in the arm. He immediately forgives her, and by the time Susie returns with some cops Slade is proposing to our antiheroine. Since bloodless wounds are the rule even in Pre-Code, no one notices that Slade has been shot, and Susie the eyewitness is disposed of with some trickery that convinces the cops that she couldn't have seen anything. The situation begs for a sequel in which psycho Susie seeks revenge on Nan, but Warners wasn't into sequels unless you count Gold Diggers of 1935, of 1937, etc. But even though Keighley and Bretherton waste opportunities on an anticlimax their closing stumble doesn't debase the entertainment value of their picture very much. If Baby Face is Stanwyck in apex-sexual-predator form, Ladies They Talk About is Barbara at her hard-boiled swaggering best. Don't expect much realism here; this picture is closer to classical, authentic pulp fiction come to cinematic life. If that idea appeals to you, so will the movie.

Warners knew that a brawling Stanwyck was a highlight, so they threw her punch into the trailer, provided as usual by TCM.com.