DVR Diary: BRIGHT LIGHTS (1935)

Busby Berkeley's comedy is a star vehicle for Joe E. Brown, Warner Bros.' leading comic of the pre-Code era, that makes a half-hearted try at being a newer kind of comedy. Acknowledging the rapid evolution within a year or so of what came to be called screwball comedy, Bright Lights grafts an already-standard feature of screwball, the "madcap heiress," onto the Brown project. Claire Whitmore (Patricia Ellis) apparently flits around the country doing whatever pricks her fancy, generating headlines whenever she's discovered. Reporter Dan Wheeler (William Gargan) discovers her working as a chorus girl in a burlesque theater where Joe Wilson (Brown) is the star comic. Wilson does an act with his wife Fay (Ann Dvorak) in which she sings while he, playing a drunk, heckles her from a balcony. Wilson combines insult humor and daredevil physical comedy; wandering the balcony to interact with audience members (or plants?), he constantly teeters on the railing until, challenged by the singer to show some talent of his own, he swings from a curtain rope Tarzan-style onto the stage, hitting the curtain and sliding down to join Fay in a soft-shoe routine. Berkeley makes the most of these scenes, shooting from angles that emphasize the (illusory) threat to the star while taking advantage of Brown's athleticism. The star does his own crucial stunt to climax the act, starting in close-up on the balcony and swinging into the curtain and sliding down. Berkeley then cuts to the stage to get a close shot of Brown landing and doing a forward roll, ending up on his feet and ready to dance. The director can trust his star later in the film to chase and then be chased by an airplane at an airport, and to hit the ground at the right moment for the plane to take off over his head. Brown gets to do the sort of things in his films, particularly those where he plays an athlete, that Buster Keaton should have been doing in sound films. Brown, however, was more of an all-around entertainer than Keaton, if less a creature of pure cinema, and Bright Lights highlights his versatility, showcasing not only his physical talent but other elements, like his drunk act and his baby talk storytelling, that probably haven't aged as well.

Brown himself is no screwball comic, though he's best remembered today for his comparatively screwball turn as an addled millionaire in Some Like It Hot. Apart from the madcap-heiress angle, Bright Lights could have been made years earlier. Tipped off by Wheeler, the producer of Anderson's Frolics hires the Wilsons and Whitmore for the latest edition of his Broadway show. Joe is ecstatic to hit the big time, but determined that Fay share the spotlight with him. When Anderson (Henry O'Neill) insists on pairing Joe with Whitmore for maximum publicity, Joe turns him down flat and is willing to sacrifice his chance at stardom, but Wheeler convinces Fay to nobly sacrifice her own ambitions so Joe can get his chance. She claims to be happy to live a life of luxury, complete with Arthur Treacher as the archetypal servant, but when the Wilsons' old burlesque producer needs an extra hand on the road, she jumps at the chance. Meanwhile, gullible Joe can't help falling for Whitmore, without realizing that she loves Wheeler. He finally sees the truth just after mailing a Dear Jane letter to Fay, prompting a final epic chase as Joe pursues the letter from mailbox to postoffice to airport to Akron, where Fay is performing. Inevitably, the film is far more star vehicle than screwball film, with the madcap heiress as little more than a plot complication, and while it's arguably more "Joe E. Brown, the Motion Picture" than his other vehicles, he's lively and likable enough to put it all over, with much help from Berkeley, who demonstrates here that he could direct a realistic backstage musical nearly as well as he managed his more famous flights of mass-choreographed fancy. Bright Lights catches Brown at or near the height of his popularity, but his star would dim by decade's end as the pretty faces of screwball eclipsed the grotesque nut comics of Brown's heyday.

JUSTICE LEAGUE (2017) in SPOILERVISION

It's not that bad as a whole, but to be honest, the first half-hour of Zack Snyder's new film, with credited co-writing and uncredited reshoots by Joss Whedon, is awful: a jumble of scenes attempting to establish an important trait of parademons (the bug-winged creatures Batman [Ben Affleck] saw in his Dawn of Justice nightmare); remind us urgently that Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) exists; and remind us more clumsily that the world is worse for the death of Superman (Henry Cavill) in the aforementioned Snyder production. Nothing really flows together and you might believe that several films, not just the Snyder and Whedon footage, had been awkwardly spliced into something crudely approximating a feature film. Nor are things helped much by the introduction of the film's villain. Steppenwolf, here embarking on his second stab at world conquest after millennia of dormancy, is a relatively minor character in Jack Kirby's "Fourth World" mythos, which few at DC Comics have really known what to do with since the King laid down his pencil. His presence here looks like a hedging of bets, as if Snyder, co-writer Chris Terrio and DC producer Geoff Johns didn't want to waste Kirby's actual big bad, the oft-misused Darkseid, on this particular movie and chose Steppenwolf as his proxy. No effort was made to give this substitute villain any personality beyond his generic lust for conquest, but I suppose you could argue that the villain of this piece was never meant to be anything more than a Macguffin, since the real story of Justice League is the formation of DC's in-print precursor and cinematic answer to Marvel's Avengers. Picking up the hints dropped like anchors in the last film, Batman and Wonder Woman set out to recruit the three supposed superbeings discovered by Lex Luthor's researchers: Arthur "The Aquaman" Curry (Jason Momoa), the bastard child of Atlantean royalty and quite the strongman on land; Barry "Flash" Allen (Ezra Miller), the young Central City speedster; and Victor "Cyborg" Stone (Ray Fisher), a man now more than half machine desperately trying to keep up with his evolving alien technology. The real purpose of this movie is to get you interested enough in these three to seek out their solo films as they appear, beginning with next year's Aquaman.

The results are mixed. All three actors succeeded in making their characters interesting, and they establish decent chemistry with each other and the established heroes. But I still question whether any of them can carry a feature film by today's standard of what such films should be. The future of the DC movie franchise now rests on the shoulders of Jason Momoa, and I'm glad to report that, liberated from his grim typecasting, the actor gives easily the best performance I've ever seen from him. But I still doubt whether whatever good will he's earned will make people interested in exploring DC's Atlantis, all too little of which was shown here apart from introducing Aquaman's eventual love interest Mera (Amber Heard). As Cyborg, Ray Fisher does probably as good as anyone could do with Marv Wolfman's character, making him sardonically bitter rather than self-pitying and adding a certain coldness that inclines the character to agree with Batman much of the time. But Cyborg has always been a hard sell as the black face of the DC Comics universe since Geoff Johns gave him that role by putting the character in his "New 52" era Justice League. Popular though he may be as one of Wolfman and George Perez's Teen Titans, Cyborg never seems to have clicked as a solo character despite Johns and other writers' stubborn efforts, and he has so little personal mythos that I find myself wondering what on earth a Cyborg movie would be about. Meanwhile, the development of a Flash movie is an ongoing nightmare for Warner Bros. Laboring in the shadow of the popular CW TV series, which automatically begs that question of what a feature film can do differently other than spend more money, the project can't hold on to a director as everyone struggles to fine-tune the property. The one thing different about Miller's Flash so far is his relative youth and his jittery Spider-Manic personality that makes him Justice League's comedy relief character. I thought Miller was likable enough to get away with it here, but I don't know if he can carry his own movie doing the same stuff. I'd be happy to see all of these guys again in another Justice League film, but despite this film's post-credit scene there are no immediate plans for another that I know of, and the drubbing the film is getting from Snyderphobic reviewers is unlikely to speed the day of their return.

I probably should talk about the story some more. The plot is right out of a serial: an artifact hunt. If Steppenwolf gets all the artifacts he can activate "the Unity," which won't be a good thing for anybody. Despite their being salted away on Atlantis, Themyscira and ... somewhere Cyborg knows about, he gets them. Fortunately, the good guys had just used that last one to resurrect their old pal Superman who, acting true to comic-book form, starts fighting them until Lois Lane (Amy Adams) shows up and tells him that the sun's getting real low, or something along those lines. Honestly, though, even in comics if Superman is messed up and not behaving right, mind-controlled, amnesiac or whatever, Lois is your best antidote. There was this one comic where to snap Superman out of Poison Ivy's mind-control, Batman has Catwoman throw Lois off a building, or at least that's how I remember it. But I digress. Anyway, Supes still needs some work in the shop so Lois takes him back for (ahem) debriefing in Smallville while the rest of the gang goes to some Sokovia-like place where Steppenwolf, his Unity and his army of parademons make life miserable for one humble family -- to, you know, make the situation more real for us, I guess. Determined that this shall not stand, the as-yet-unnamed Justice League -- I think the only person who actually describes them as a "league" is Lex Luthor (our old friend Jesse Eisenberg) in a post-credits secene -- go about delaying the bad guy until Superman is cleared for action, after which point there's really no contest.

Sounds stupid, right? Well, it kind of is, but while this is regrettably one of those films where the whole is less than the sum of its parts, a lot of those parts are quite entertaining. While Fisher, Miller and Momoa held up their end of the deal, Affleck, Cavill and Gadot were once more their reliable selves, though our Batman is much more mild-mannered than in his last appearance, to a degree that's left some again questioning his commitment to the franchise. I actually liked the change of pace and the way some things (like Bruce Wayne's whiskey-swilling) remained the same. So the acting was fine, apart from the helpless Ciaran Hinds, tasked with voicing Steppenwolf. As one might expect from Zack Snyder, some of the action is spectacular. The highlights include an extended battle on Themyscira as the Amazons run a desperate relay race to keep their artifact from Steppenwolf; a flashback establishing Steppenwolf's backstory featuring a super-epic battle pitting Amazons, Atlanteans, Olympian gods, Green Lanterns, etc. against old-timey parademons; and the guilty pleasure of the JL's brawl with the reawakened Superman, who seems capable of matching the Flash's speed (Miller sells this wonderfully) and trading head-butts with Wonder Woman all day. For all its many flaws, the film ultimately entertains. I'd reverse the conventional reviewer consensus and contend that Justice League is marginally worse than Dawn of Justice, and almost the weakest of this year's good crop of superhero movies -- after a second viewing of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, I'm inclined to leave that at the bottom. Snyder and Whedon have done Warner Bros. no great favors as far as Friday morning reviewers are concerned, but I close with the observation that at my half-full multiplex screening the audience applauded the film.

Pre-Code Parade: FROM HEADQUARTERS (1933)

 

Historical note: this ad from a Pittsburgh paper references a high-profile Chicago murder case of the time

William Dieterle's early police procedural hardly runs longer than an episode of a modern TV police drama. It could almost serve as a prototype for how to do such stories in an hourlong format. Some might also see it as a prototype for multiple-POV films like Rashomon, except that no two characters involved in the killing of dissolute curio collector and part-time blackmailer Gordon Bates (Kenneth Thomson) describe the exact same events. Each is an individual puzzle piece to the mystery, arriving at the Bates department at a different time. The detectives don't have to choose between stories, since they rely on forensic evidence and other modern methods to narrow down the suspect list. With a stolid George Brent in the lead, Headquarters is a showcase for Warner Bros.' stock company of character actors, from Eugene Pallette as a thuggish detective too quick to jump to conclusions to Hobart Cavanaugh in a typically weaselly role as a safecracker, only a little more hard-boiled than usual, to Hugh Herbert in comedy relief as an aggressive bail-bondsman, to the always-watchable Robert Barrat as both villain and red herring simultaneously. Despite the film's brisk pace, Dieterle finds time to develop the melodramatic angle that a female suspect (Margaret Lindsay) is the Brent character's girlfriend, and to indulge in the semi-documentary spectacle of modern police work. The actual story doesn't even get underway until after a plotless tour of the overnight lock-up emphasizing the casual rapport of cops and crooks (not to mention the reporters who infest the station) and the practical jokes the former sometimes play on the latter. We see the wonders of a pre-computer card-sorting system that allows the cops to narrow their searches down to specialized profile; the thrill of guns being fired into wads of cotton so the markings on the bullets can be matched with those found on the murder victim; etc. etc. -- plus a rather creepy medical examiner. In true procedural fashion, the story keeps introducing new data to keep the audience guessing, though it may have overplayed its hand by having the Barrat character overreact to the Cavanaugh character recognizing him. That moment clears up one particularly mystifying aspect of the mystery, but what Barratt does afterward seems disproportionate to his actual involvement in the original crime. Of course, the writers want you to think he's more involved than he actually was, since they're saving a final twist for the end. There's something brazen and almost arrogant about that twist, because it brings a movie that until then had emphasized its ultramodernity to its close with one of the hoariest old cliches of whodunit fiction. Headquarters carries it straightfacedly enough to take itself almost to the realm of camp, but I suppose it was all just showmanship. Films as self-consciously modern as this one often make the best windows into our past as they age, but whether Headquarters serves that purpose for you or not, it's still an easy way to waste an hour without regret.

Pre-Code Parade: MASSACRE (1934)

Alan Crosland's modern-day western describes a slow-motion massacre: the systematic exploitation and swindling of Native Americans by corrupt Indian agents. It may not be as violent as what you saw in period westerns, but as the protagonist says, "It's a massacre any way you take it." He's an intriguingly ambiguous figure. Joe "Chief" Thunder Horse (Richard Barthelmess) is a riding, roping star of a wild west show playing, ironically enough, at Chicago's "Century of Progress" exposition. Joe plays the stereotyped bare-chested taciturn savage for the audience, but in reality he's as nearly deracinated as an Indian could be, admitting to his white girlfriend of the moment (Claire Dodd), who embarrasses him by redecorating one of her rooms into a mini museum of native artifacts, that "I wouldn't know a medicine man from a bootlegger" after using an old mortar and pestle as an ashtray. Barthelmess often seems the slow learner of the Warner Bros. stock company, but performing alongside people playing taciturn Indians all the time, he seems as much a glib, fast-talking smartass Warners hero as he ever would be. Joe has to go back on the rez when he learns that his father is gravely ill. Driving with his personal servant Sam (Clarence Muse) in his deluxe roadster -- his name is on the door, his face on the spare-tire case -- Joe rediscovers a dusty wasteland ruled over by the federal agent, Elihu B. Quissenberry (a reliably repulsive Dudley Digges) with his ally in swindling, the undertaker Shanks (Sidney Toler) and his minions, an alcoholic doctor (Arthur Hohl) and a puppet sheriff (Charles "Ming the Merciless" Middleton). They have a nice racket going on in which Shanks makes a mint on overpriced caskets and burials while Quissenberry enriches himself by administering estates. You can tell that Joe's dad isn't going to get proper medical attention from this lot, but Joe's been off the rez long enough to be shocked by it all, despite the efforts of agency secretary Lydia -- like himself, a college-educated Indian (Ann Dvorak) -- to wise him up. Joe may be seeing the world, but Lydia tells him there's a lot about the world they don't teach you at the old alma mater. Joe's old man was still a traditional man and Joe decides he should have a traditional funeral, which enrages Quissenberry more because it skips Shanks's funeral racket than because it represents some "pagan" revival.

Joe clearly has become a disruptive element whom the agency people should like to see leave as soon as possible to make $400 a week back in Chicago. But when Shanks rapes Joe's 15 year old sister -- they don't say the r-word of course, but it could not be more obvious within Pre-Code bounds -- it looks like they'll be stuck with him for a while. In a brutal modernization of the typical western chase, Joe in his car pursues Shanks in his until, cowboy style, he ropes the rapist. Slamming his brakes, he snaps Shanks out of his car and into the dirt, and drags him awhile before leaving him in a ditch. He'd already roughed up the agency doctor, so inevitably Joe gets arrested. Since Shanks is still alive it's only an assault charge that sends Joe to jail for 90 days after a kangaroo trial and leaves him a few hundred dollars poorer. He can afford that, but if Shanks dies he'll face a murder charge. Before that happens, Lydia arranges to break him out of jail so he can go to Washington D.C. and take his case directly to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Since Joe has the most conspicuous getaway vehicle imaginable, Sam sacrifices himself by driving the Thunderhorse-mobile into an obvious trap while Joe hops a freight for the nation's capital.  There, in keeping with Warners' favorable attitude toward the FDR presidency, our hero finds a sympathetic bureaucrat (Henry O'Neill) who's been trying to expose agency corruption but hasn't found anyone willing to testify about it. He sends Joe back to the rez with a federal attorney to investigate things, but Shanks has died in the interim and there's a murder warrant out for Joe. If it hadn't been plain before what Shanks had done to Joe's sister, the understanding that Joe will use the "unwritten law" defense to justify his killing should have left things clear even to the dimmest viewer. For that defense to work, however, the girl has to testify, but Quissenberry's minions have abducted her. That finally takes the tribe to the breaking point. They propose to raid the town to liberate Joe and burn the courthouse. Again, Massacre resists the temptation to portray this as a reversion to savagery. Just as Joe never reverts to the native address he identifies with wild west show hokum, the Indians look like your typical American lynch mob in modern dress, arriving by car as well as wagon or horseback, except that they're riding to the rescue. However, Joe joins those appealing to the rule of law as the courthouse burns, determined to stand trial like a good citizen until he learns that his sister has been kidnapped. That sets up one more ride to the rescue, one more horrifying revelation of the mistreatment of Indians, and a final dangerous showdown with a desperate Quissenberry.

While the climax teases a tragic finish, Massacre ends happily with Joe giving up show business for a new career as a conscientious representative of the U.S. government and a new life with Lydia. Compared to other movie exposes of reservation oppresses, Massacre is relatively unpatronizing toward Indians and is admirable in its commitment to modernity. The traditional funeral for Joe's father might not seem consistent with that commitment, but as Joe says, no one bothers Christians when they practice their religion, so why not let Indians worship their way? Maybe it's me, but I doubt Joe himself is very religious either way. Joe is one of Barthelmess's best talkie performances, along with the same year's A Modern Hero, and it's sad that Warner's dropped him just as he seemed to be getting the hang of talkie stardom. You can still see that the once-boyish Barthelmess, going on 39 when Massacre came out, was losing his movie-star looks. The bags under his eyes undermine Joe's alleged magnetism, but the actor puts enough charisma into his performance to make up for his fading beauty. Apart from Barthelmess, Massacre has obvious historic interest (if not continued relevance) for its portrayal of Native Americans' plight at a time when Calvin Coolidge's grant of citizenship to reservation Indians (as noted in the film) may have made some believe all problems were solved. Crosland's direction is solid, but special credit goes to whoever chose the desolate location where much of the film takes place. If anything, Massacre's story is too good to be true, but it's fun to see a western with a successful Indian uprising and the U.S. government cheering the Indians on.

Pre-Code Parade: Fatty Arbuckle speaks!

Tragedy is sometimes just a matter of timing. The tragedy of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle is that he died in the middle of rewriting his tragic narrative. A heart attack claimed him at age 46, reportedly on the very day in 1933 that Warner Bros. signed him to a feature-film contract. Arbuckle had already finished Stage One of his comeback from an exile imposed on him despite a most emphatic acquittal after his third manslaughter trial for the death of Virginia Rappe. Merely to have taken part in the wild party where Rappe took ill, it seems, had been enough to justify making an example of Arbuckle at a time when Hollywood had been rocked by its first serious moral scandals. Like future blacklisted talent, Arbuckle never fully disappeared from the entertainment business. He performed in vaudeville and on Broadway, and returned to Hollywood to direct movies under a pseudonym. It seems right that he was called back before the camera during the Pre-Code era, but Arbuckle's six Big V shorts for Warners aren't really Pre-Code pictures in the salacious sense. You can divide them between nostalgic knockabouts in Arbuckle's old style (particularly How've You Been?, in which Fatty wastes his already-limited grocery store stock mindlessly hurling sacks of flour at a suspected criminal) and forays into contemporary nut comedy. I happen to like the nuttier films the best, but they're also the shorts in which Arbuckle most seems like an interchangeable part in the Big V machine.

Comedies like Close Relations and Tomalio (the latter finished the day before Arbuckle died) are more ensemble pieces than star vehicles, though Arbuckle's face fills the title cards. Big V had an eclectic stock company that included Shemp Howard (who must have had the longest hair on a Hollywood man at the time) a young Lionel Stander and the studio's most underrated comic, Charles Judels. With a range from the amiable to the apoplectic, Judels' signature was a closed-mouthed whine like a whistling kettle. Playing a psychotic Latin American general who can summon a firing squad to any location with his trusty whistle and insists on hearing the Lohengrin overture during executions, whether on a jukebox or performed by a three-piece band, Judels pretty much steals Tomalio from Arbuckle, who with his Kansas accent never sounds more like Oliver Hardy than in that short's clever opening shot. Fatty is shown in close-up sitting in the middle of the desert, angrily asking an unseen interlocutor, Hardy-style, "Why don't you help me?" The camera pulls back to indicate that Fatty is talking to a mule. Then we hear another voice, and the camera pulls further back to reveal that the mule is sitting on Fatty's sidekick for the picture. These shorts mostly have nice production values, though several opt for cheap animation effects to portray insect attacks or eruptions of Mexican jumping beans across a dinner table. They seem state of the art otherwise, but Arbuckle himself, however good-natured, seems old-fashioned in his standard costume with high-water pants and a voice that marks him as an oldschool rube. He still has some of his physical skills, best displayed in his juggling of kitchen implements and ingredients in Hello, Pop!, though he doesn't take the truly epic bumps he did in his youth. For that matter, the films themselves often flinch from large-scale destruction, usually setting up a violent collision, then cutting to someone's reaction shot before showing us the wreckage. It's an odd quirk that doesn't really harm the films very much.

Watching the Arbuckle shorts in a Warner Archive Big V collection was a nostalgic experience for me. I remember long long ago seeing In the Dough played in the wee hours on The Joe Franklin Show, at a time when I knew about Fatty Arbuckle but not about his Vitaphone shorts. Seeing him talk on screen late that night was like looking into an alternate reality. While I found all the shorts are all fairly entertaining -- Tomalio, Close Relations (Fatty is named an heir to a fortune but discovers his uncle [Judels] is a gouty lunatic) and Buzzin' Around (Fatty invents a shatterproof coating for ceramics but takes a jar of hard cider to town for the demonstration by mistake) are the best -- they do leave you wondering how much further Arbuckle might have gone had he lived. He was probably at the right studio, Warners being the home of Joe E. Brown, another exemplary physical comedian. Brown occupied his own separate universe at Warners, his films arguably more kiddie fare than the studio's typical Pre-Code product, and you can imagine Arbuckle making features in a similar sphere. Would we have seen Fatty among the comics in A Midsummer Night's Dream, or grappling with such absurdities as Sh! The Octopus? Would Warners have given him a chance in more adult  fare, possibly as a younger version of Guy Kibbee? Or would Arbuckle have ended up making crap at Columbia alongside his great friend Buster Keaton by the end of the decade? Or would the backlash that led to Code Enforcement drive him from the screen again? The real tragedy of Fatty Arbuckle is that we can't know. His story ends all too abruptly on what he reportedly called the best day of his life.

DVR Diary: TRAVELING SALESLADY (1935)

It's been argued that the advent of Code Enforcement in 1934 liberated women in Hollywood movies. because they could no longer use sex as such a blatant survival tool, they gained the freedom to be romantic, whimsical, less carnal or crass. I suppose Ray Enright's Traveling Saleslady could serve as proof for that proposition. Here are Warner Bros.' "Gimme Girls," Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell, together again, but while the advertising would make you think this is another gold-digging adventure for the dynamic dames, they're anything but gold diggers in this picture, nor are they a team. Blondell is an heiress, the only child of toothpaste magnate Rufus Twitchell (Grant Mitchell). She wants to be Dad's heir and helper in business like the son he never had would have been, but the old man is conservative in more ways than one. Unwilling to try new things, he thinks women unfit for business. Angela Twitchell is determined to prove him wrong. Sympathizing with a dotty scientist who has waited in vain for three months to see the old man (Hugh Herbert, confusingly participating in a screenplay co-written by his near-doppelganger, F. Hugh Herbert), she decides to take a chance on his invention: flavored toothpaste. She buys into the scientist's insane notion that you can market toothpaste to adults by making it in alcoholic flavors -- one must hope the stuff is odorless -- and it tells you something about the time this film was made that the idea is a tremendous hit with the public.

Angela becomes a covert competitor to her father. Not having the capital to start her own company, she leases the rights to "Cocktail Toothpaste" to Twitchell's biggest competitor, on the condition that she be hired under an assumed name to sell the stuff to drugstores. This makes her a direct rival to Twitchell's biggest salesman, Pat O'Connor (William Gargan). Ironically, it's Pat who uses sex (so we presume) as a career-advancement tool. He runs up a big expense account entertaining potential clients, and one of the biggest clients is the Ruggles drug store chain. Angela, aka "M. Smith," tries to pitch flavored toothpaste to company president C. Ruggles, and there's a magic moment when she confronts Claudette Ruggles (Farrell). Each is so exceptional as an entrepreneurial female that neither expects the other to be a woman. There's no such thing as gender solidarity in the toothpaste business, however, and Ruggles gives Angela the brush off, mainly because Pat O'Connor is her boyfriend. Farrell is second billed, since she and Blondell were recognized as a team, but she's really the fourth most important character, at best, after Pat and the scientist. The main story is saleslady vs. salesman, not Blondell vs. Farrell, as Angela learns the cut-throat ropes of the business with streamlined quickness while flirting with her antagonist. Despite his business loyalty to Ruggles, Pat can't help falling in love with "Smith," and if anything this is the most implausible part of the picture. The budding romantic feelings are mutual, you see, but these two are dedicated to destroying one another professionally, and Angela is winning. Her victories are parricidal as well as betrayals of a potential lover, for as she drives up her company's market share, Twitchell is forced to lay people off. Fortunately -- and I don't know if this is a Code requirement or not -- we're told that every single person laid off by Twitchell is hired by Angela's employer.

The final showdown comes at the big drug store sales convention in Chicago. Angela gets the early plane there and humiliates O'Connor and Ruggles by setting them up to be flown there by a skywriter advertising for Cocktail Toothpaste. Pat and Claudette hope to schmooze the other buyers by holding a big party with free eats in Pat's hotel suite, but Angela cheats by putting a "Rehearsal in Progress" sign over his door -- which really should have been open to begin with -- and redirecting everyone to her pitchroom. The results are devastating for Twitchell; the company meets only 10% of its sales goal and is forced to the wall. Angela even succeeds in breaking up Pat and Claudette, and there's another magic moment when Claudette, conned by Angela, declares herself through with men after discovering Pat's apparent betrayal. "GIGOLO!" they shout together in the ultimate role-reversal from the old gold-digging days.  After all this, it seems too good to be true when Angela saves her father's company by reminding her boss that the one-year lease is up and the rights to Cocktail Toothpaste have returned to her, to be leased anew on the condition that the rival companies merge on terms favorable to her old man. This act of filial piety apparently is enough to make Pat O'Connor forget all the defeats and humiliations meted out to him by Angela -- whose true identity he's just learning now -- and agree to a merger of a different sort. I think we know who'll wear the pants in that household.

In a way, Traveling Saleslady is a vindication if not apotheosis of Blondell and Farrell, since the same mercenary determination they showed in the gold-digging films makes them mistresses of the universe here. It's just a shame that the writers never considered having Angela try to win Claudette over after the first rebuff, since you'd like to see Glenda Farrell use her brain rather than some other organ for this important business decision -- though if Claudette Ruggles found booze-flavored toothpaste a hopelessly ridiculous idea I couldn't really blame her.

DVR Diary: BROADWAY THROUGH A KEYHOLE (1933) and GO INTO YOUR DANCE (1935)

One fine day in the summer of 1933, Al Jolson beat up Walter Winchell at a Los Angeles sports arena. Jolson was "the World's Greatest Entertainer" while Winchell has basically pioneered the concept of the celebrity gossip columnist. Since there's no one really like Winchell today in our crowdsourced gossip cloud, I can only try to suggest as a theoretical modern equivalent Kanye West punching out the host of an awards show on live TV for insulting Kim Kardashian. Winchell, you see, had come to Hollywood to make a movie for Darryl F. Zanuck's new studio, Twentieth Century Pictures, and from what Jolson had heard and seen, the story, directed by sometime actor Lowell Sherman, hit too close to home. It told of a young dancer who rose to stardom as a gangster's protege but fell in love with a singer. To Jolson this sounded uncomfortably like the story of Ruby Keeler, who rose to stage stardom while being courted by a real gangster, only to end up married to Al Jolson. Despite Jolson's forceful objections, the film was finished and released in November 1933. A year and a half later, Jolson and Keeler, mighty stars at Warner Bros., teamed on film for the first time in Archie Mayo's Go Into Your Dance. In some ways their film is a variation on themes by Winchell. These musicals, one pre-Code, one made during Code Enforcement, are two of a kind, proto-noirperas distinct from the vivacious ruthlessness and giddy cartoonishness of other films in the genre, injecting into the familiar backstage or behind-the-scenes proceedings the threat of violent death.

Broadway Through a Keyhole is literally a death-haunted film. Legendary nightclub MC Texas Guinan appears as a barely-disguised version of herself, down to her famed "Hello, Sucker!" greeting. Guinan died three days after the premiere. Russ Columbo, a peer pioneering crooner with Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee, is the film's romantic lead, the singer who wins Constance Cummings from her gangland mentor. Less than a year later he died in what was reported as a freak accidental shooting. Before 1934 was over Lowell Sherman was dead of double pneumonia. Paul Kelly, the film's gangster, really killed a man, serving 25 months for manslaughter before marrying the man's widow. But for all of that, Go Into Your Dance is the more noirish musical, while Through a Keyhole resolves itself into a melodrama of renunciation that redeems the gangster.

Frank "Rocky" Rocci (Kelly) runs the American Poultry Protective Association, or something to that effect. It's a protection racket that collects tribute from anyone transporting poultry to New York City. Through A Keyhole establishes the violent manner in which Rocci establishes his hegemony -- Winchell describes a quiet night on Broadway until a poultry truck is suddenly rammed and wrecked -- but portrays him primarily as a nightclub impresario who amicably buys out Tex Kaley (Guinan) to make her club a showcase for Joan Whelan (Cummings). Rocci's patronage, Whelan's talent and the choreography of Max Mefooski (future director Gregory Ratoff) make Joan a star, making her immediately attractive to Clark Brian (Columbo), a handsome, hypochondriac bandleader at the Florida hotel where Joan vacations who has Hobart Bosworth as an unlikely wingman. Encouraged to cheat on Rocci by her traveling companion, the moll of Rocci's number two man, Joan reluctantly returns to New York when a suspicious Rocci summons her. Clark can't give her up and follows her north, impressing Rocci with his hopeless courage when the inevitable confrontation comes. However improbably, Rocci's convinced that Joan's sincere gratitude isn't true love and shouldn't be exploited by him at the expense of her happiness. The gangster consents to the entertainers' marriage, but on their way to the honeymoon the couple gets carjacked. Clark is tossed from the car while the kidnappers drive off with Joan. Assuming that Rocci is to blame, Clark confronts him, only for both men to realize that that's exactly what Rocci's sometime ally and constant rival Tim Crowley (dependably vile C. Henry Gordon) wants everyone to think. To show his bona fides Rocci goes on a rescue mission, only to charge into his enemy's trap; Crowley has called the cops to tip them off to where Rocci supposedly has Joan stashed. Rocci gets shot up, but the film actually leaves us uncertain whether he'll live or die, ending with him lying in a darkened hospital room, staring lovingly at the nearby lights of Broadway.

Sherman takes the "Keyhole" part of the title literally, using a keyhole as an iris-type transitional device at the opening and close of the film, and occasionally in between. But that's as gimmicky as the direction gets, if you don't count the sub-Berkeleyan dance direction that sometimes descends to raw cheesecake as chorines flex their bare legs, but also achieves the cool of a troupe of cross-dressing females in top hats and tails. The alliteration of Max Mefooski's name made me wonder whether Zanuck didn't intend him as a mild parody of the dancing master of his old stomping grounds at Warner Bros. In the end, Through a Keyhole isn't as edgy as it may have been meant to be, or as grim as Go Into Your Dance gets.

By 1935 Ruby Keeler had arguably eclipsed Al Jolson as a Warner Bros. musical star, thanks to Berkeley's spotlighting her in his epochal pre-Code musicals.  Jolson was actually on the comeback trail, bouncing back from the failure of the eccentric Hallelujah, I'm a Bum with 1934's Wonder Bar. Still, there were whispers that Keeler was now the bigger star of the family, while Go Into Your Dance itself presents Keeler as Jolson's redeemer while at the same time teasing a jealous fantasy of her destruction that actually was in keeping with the way Jolson played for pathos in his star vehicles.

A generation before Bing Crosby got an Oscar nomination playing a drunken singer, Jolson plays Al Howard, a problematic superstar who gets blackballed from Broadway for his bad habit of walking out on shows early in their runs. The implication is that he goes off on benders, but Jolson doesn't really do a drunk act here. He comes across more like a flighty, irresponsible brat. Of all people, Glenda Farrell, the apex predator of Warners' gold diggers, plays Al's responsible kid sister who struggles to get his career back on track. She arranges for him to headline at a Chicago nightclub, on the condition that he costar with a dancer. While stalker Patsy Kelly hankers for that role -- Al's contemptuous treatment of her only makes him look more like a big jerk -- the plum role goes to Dot Wayne (Keeler), with whom Al inevitably falls in love, insofar as Al can love anyone but himself. He does love that her dancing, combined with his putting over standards-to-be like "About A Quarter to Nine" -- I remember some commercial using Jolson's rendition sixty-some years later -- makes him a big enough hit again that he can think about reconquering Broadway on his own terms, by opening his own club.

Talent he's got, but to open that club Al needs mazuma. Enter Chicago gangster Duke Hutchinson (Barton MacLane), who likes the idea because it'd make an ideal showcase for his own lover, the singer Luana Wells (Helen Morgan, a real-life peer of Jolson). Luana wants to be Al's partner in more ways than one, forcing our hero to struggle between his loyalty to Dot and his obligation to the gangster. His balancing act is disrupted when out of nowhere Sis gets arrested for murder. She needs a huge amount of bail money but all Al's got is his seed money from Chicago, which he needs to post a bond for his new show. At last he's trying to be a responsible entertainer, and now Dot's pressuring him to drop everything and use the money to bail out his sister. He resists, then succumbs. Now the clock is ticking. Sis has to report for trial or else Al forfeits the gangster's bail money, his club never opens, and he's a dead man.

As the deadline approaches, Hutchinson sends two hitmen to New York to whack Al if the club fails to open. At nearly the last moment -- Al's already making an apology speech to his cast and crew -- Sis and her lawyers come through with exculpatory evidence and the show can go on. Word reaches Chicago, but Hutchinson already has his men staked outside the club and in this caveman age he has no way to contact them and wave them off. He tries to warn Al but the star is already on stage (in blackface, of course) and can't be interrupted. Finally Hutchinson thinks of his own girl and phones Luana to have her call off the hitmen. In a sublime moment of understated evil, she steps outside to verify that there are, indeed, hired killers at hand, and simply gives them a nod. If Al won't have her, he can die....except that it's Dot that takes the bullet. She lives, sure -- and as far as we know Luana goes unpunished -- but this is brutal stuff for a 1935 musical, and if we're to judge these two films as proto-noir musicals, then Go Into Your Dance actually ends up more hard boiled, despite Jolson, than the pre-Code Keyhole.

As a just plain musical, Go Into Your Dance is better at singing than dancing. The title song became a sort of unofficial theme for musical comedy at Warners for the rest of the decade; I recognized it instantly from many other studio films. As cinema it's Jolson's big blackface moment (he does a defensive sort of Mammy song in his own skin early in the picture) and despite the black it comes off better than the more ambitious numbers staged by Bobby Connolly, Busby Berkeley presumably being busy on Gold Diggers of 1935. The "About a Quarter to Nine" number is Berkeleyesque in ambition but Connolly and Mayo lacks the master's cinematic instincts or his way with bodies en masse. It reels into nonsense like a dissolve transition turning a Keeler solo dance into a minstrel show and an embarrassing shot of Keeler and Jolson sitting on the moon that Georges Melies could have topped. Neither movie discussed here really has a classic number to make it a great musical, though Go Into Your Dance clearly has the talent to be one. Together they take us to a fascinating dead end of musical-film evolution, along a path that probably could not be taken any further once Code Enforcement had fully set in and bubbly happiness was the order of the day.

Pre-Code Parade: BROADMINDED (1931)

You can see the first hints of the road-trip comedy in Mervyn LeRoy's film, which offers Joe E. Brown as a dubious chaperone to a wastrel friend on a cross-country trip to California. But most of the action takes place at the end of the trip, and overall Warner Bros. hasn't yet figured out how to best exploit Brown's slapstick athleticism; here he's pretty much a guy with a big mouth, a figure whose clowning borders on the pathological. He's the guy who shows up at the young people's "baby party" and takes the act to extremes, arriving in a pram and really, really getting into the role more than anyone else. The story is conventional stuff, having both Brown and his sidekick (William "Buster" Collier) fall for California girls but having their romances complicated by the arrival of an old flame from the east, for Collier, and the reappearance, for Brown, of an enemy made on the road. This enemy gives Broadminded its main interest today, for he is Bela Lugosi, six months after the release of Dracula.

For Lugosi this movie represents a road ultimately not taken. It's an attempt by Warners to try him out as an all-purpose ethnic, in the role of a tourist from the country of "South America." That role requires Lugosi to be very different from Dracula. He must be loud, he must talk relatively fast, and when Brown really annoys him, as when the comic sprays ink on Bela's dessert, the offended man gives chase at a vigorous, elbow-churning pace. It's not really a great performance, but it belies any notion that Lugosi's Dracula represents the limits of his English or his acting style. He's not exactly convincing as a Latin American, especially by today's standards, but if you pay attention you can hear how he's modulating his accent slightly to fit the part. But if Broadminded gives us a rare glimpse of a non-typecast Lugosi, LeRoy clearly appreciates Bela's essential gifts. The most Lugosian moment in the film comes when Brown's party are dining in a restaurant booth and Brown recounts his dealings with his Latin antagonist, not realizing that the man himself has just been seated in the next booth. Lugosi hears Brown's boasting and, recognizing the hated voice, gets up and peers over the partition behind him at Brown. Naturally, this is the last place Brown expected to see Lugosi, and his reaction to seeing Bela's face is an easy gag. But then LeRoy holds a shot of Lugosi peering over the partition, now with only half his face showing, most importantly those eyes. If more directors found ways to exploit Lugosi's most obvious gifts without relegating him to what was quickly becoming a ghetto for horror films, we might think of Broadminded as a different kind of milestone in a very different career.

Pre-Code Parade: SINNERS' HOLIDAY (1930)

Preceding Little Caesar into theaters by several weeks, John G. Adolfi's Sinners' Holiday arguably marks the beginning not only of the fabled Warner Bros. gangster genre but of "Warner Bros." itself as an archetype or style rather than a mere studio. It's the first film pairing of James Cagney, whose film debut this was, and Joan Blondell, making only her second feature film, and they instantly make it recognizable as a "Warner Bros." film in a way many studio releases of the same year aren't. Blondell and Cagney came to Hollywood to recreate the roles they played on Broadway, when the play was known as Penny Arcade and an appreciative Al Jolson, Warners' big musical star, was in the audience. They are not the primary characters, though Cagney plays a pivotal role. They seem immediately at home in a milieu of cynical, hard-boiled fast talk that soon would define the studio product. That milieu is a boardwalk full of carny attractions, including the once-titular arcade operated by Ma Delano (Lucille LaVerne). Cagney's her youngest, Harry, and the role reminds me of Kirk Douglas in some of his earliest pictures when he might have been typed as a weasel. Keeping his voice at a high pitch, Cagney plays Harry as the sort of physical, mental and moral weakling moral experts then assumed gangsters to be; watching this, you understand why he was cast initially as the sidekick in The Public Enemy. While his Ma thinks him a good boy, Harry hangs out in pool halls, sucking up to Mitch (Warren Hymer), a bootlegger who runs some of the boardwalk concessions. The actual main character of the film is Angel (Grant Withers), an ex-con barker fired by Mitch and hired by Ma Delano to repair her arcade machines. She can use Angel but doesn't trust him, and she definitely doesn't want him hanging around her daughter Jennie (Evalyn Knapp). Harry has a crush on Myrtle (Blondell), a small-time gold digger, and an unlikely rival for her attentions in Happy (Hank Mann, Chaplin's opponent in the City Lights boxing match and quite adept in talkies.), another boardwalk carny.

The main plot kicks in when Mitch is pinched and has to serve time. Harry takes a chance and takes over the bootlegging operation, explaining his new wealth to his ma with vague remarks. When Mitch gets out he's out to get Harry, who shoots his erstwhile mentor in panic during a threatening confrontation. Jennie has seen the shooting but keeps silent as the cops start investigating. Suspicion swirls circumstantially around Angel, while Harry bribes Myrtle into providing an alibi for him. Ma starts to notice the holes in the stories Harry's telling, and doesn't like the way Myrtle is flaunting an apparent new power over her boy. Under pressure, Harry cracks in Cagney's big scene on both stage and screen. Blubbering like a baby, Harry begs Ma to cover for him. Still hostile to Angel, Ma agrees to help frame him for the killing, not realizing how easily Jennie can destroy their plan....

The stage is set for a tragic family showdown, but at the supreme moment Sinner's Holiday simply runs out of gas. The trap is almost shut around Angel when Jennie turns on her mother and brother. When she spills, we'd expect, after seeing Cagney's abject antics earlier, to see Harry have another breakdown, or attempt a breakout and go out like Cody Jarrett, a role for whom in some ways Harry Delano seems like a rough draft. But no, none of the above: once Jennie rats him out he surrenders instantly and dispassionately, like a good loser, consoling Ma by telling her, "You tried." This scene practically defines "anticlimax." The ultimate disappointment probably explains why Sinners' Holiday isn't as well remembered or regarded as its place in history might lead you to expect. Nevertheless, it's an indisputable milestone in the evolution of Warner Bros., with Cagney and Blondell -- aided admirably by the underrated Withers -- virtually creating a cinematic world before our eyes, or at least beginning the process.

DVR Diary: ALEXANDER HAMILTON (1931)

In 2015 Alexander Hamilton was reintroduced to pop culture in phenomenal fashion by Lin-Manuel Miranda's Tony-winning hip-hop musical, which has won guarded endorsements from historians like Ron Chernow, on whose biography it is largely based, and Gordon S. Wood, the dean of historians of the Revolutionary era. Miranda apparently has succeeded in making the first Secretary of the Treasury not only relevant but fascinating -- Chernow's book is a best-seller again -- through his choice of music and lyrics and aggressively inclusive casting in which almost none of the players are white. Miranda is 36 years old. He plays a man who died at age 49. Miranda follows in the footsteps of Mr. George Arliss (as movie publicists worshipfully called him), who wrote a 1917 play about Hamilton and starred in John G. Adolfi's film adaptation fourteen years later. Arliss's Hamilton -- on the strength of his Oscar-winning turn in Disraeli the actor had considerable creative control over his work at Warner Bros., Adolfi being little more than his stooge -- is microfocused on one episode in the great man's short yet eventful career, but opens several years earlier with the disbanding of the Continental Army in 1783. In this scene Hamilton, then 28, is played, as in the rest of the picture, by Arliss, then age 63. The principal action is set in 1790, when Hamilton was 35, and Arliss is still 63. Only our imagining of all the Founders and Framers as patriarchal figures can excuse such ghastly casting, but without Arliss there probably would be no Hamilton movie in 1931. What would we have missed?

Alexander Hamilton's subject is the Funding Act of 1790, better known as the Assumption Bill. If approved by Congress, the federal government will take responsibility for the debts the states owe to Revolutionary War soldiers, many of whom were still owed considerable back pay. Hamilton considers this step necessary to establish the credit of the new federal government. It is opposed mainly by southerners, including Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson (Montagu Love) and James Monroe (Morgan Wallace) -- James Madison is strangely absent from the movie even though he was one of the leaders of the opposition to the bill in the House of Representatives, while Monroe did not join the Senate until November 1790, after the bill was passed and signed -- along with the fictional Senator Roberts of nowhere in particular (Dudley Digges). They dislike the measure because it will compel states that have paid their soldiers, like Jefferson and Monroe's Virginia, to help bail out other states. Jefferson also sees it as part of Hamilton's overall program for a consolidated central government, which he sees as fatal to state autonomy. Another factor in the opposition that doesn't come up until later in the picture is the fact that speculators were swarming the country buying up veterans' IOUs from their state governments in the expectation of making a killing if the feds paid up at full face value. Hamilton can't be bothered with Jefferson's ideological paranoia, but at least the Virginian is making a principled stand. Roberts proves more dangerous because he's less principled. You probably could guess he'd be the bad guy once you realized he wasn't real, and if you recognized Dudley Digges as a regular heel actor in pictures.

Hamilton thinks he can win over the Virginians by promising them that the permanent U.S. capital will be built in the South. He'll get northern congressmen to sign off on that idea as long as Jefferson and Monroe can get their fellow southerners to support the assumption plan. The location of the capital really matters to the Virginians, so they'll willing to make a deal, but the unreconciled Roberts tries to sabotage everything by entrapping Hamilton in a compromising situation with a young woman while Mrs. H. is away in London. The trap sprung, Roberts blackmails the secretary, telling him to withdraw the bill or face public exposure. In real life, Hamilton probably would have challenged Roberts to a duel, but in reel life he preempts the senator by confessing his indiscretion. After that there's apparently nothing left to do but resign, but in a Charlie Brown Christmas moment the leaders of his own party and the opposition, including Jefferson and Monroe, and President Washington himself (Alan Mowbray) in full military uniform, show up to announce that the Funding Bill has been passed by an overwhelming margin and that of course Hamilton can stay in the Treasury! Imagine what the Clintons could have accomplished back in the 1990s if politics actually worked this way.

I suppose Mr. Arliss might not bother you if you didn't know how young Hamilton was, but he does look pretty ghastly. There's something immobile and lacquered about his face that seems exaggerated by his own knowledge that he's playing a much younger person. As a dramatist he does an okay job of setting up the issues behind the assumption debate, only to trivialize them with his pandering melodramatic subplot. Oddly, I can see the seeds of Capracorn in Arliss's tale of a principled man nearly broken by manufactured scandal but vindicated by other people's good conscience at the end. Capra did it better, though, because he was totally untethered from history, while Arliss's plot contrivances turn a promising historical picture into a travesty as well as a preposterous ego trip. A hip-hop Hamilton might seem authentic by comparison.

Pre-Code Parade: HAVANA WIDOWS (1933)

"How many times do I have to tell you, find out who a guy is before you slug him."

- Joan Blondell to Glenda Farrell 

Contemporary movie reporters for local newspapers, presumably guided by studio publicity, treated Ray Enright's comedy as a kind of prose sequel to Busby Berkeley's musicals of 1933, which made gold diggers a hotter topic than ever as well as revolutionizing film choreography. Joan Blondell had appeared in two of the Berkeley musicals, Gold Diggers of 1933 and Footlight Parade. Havana Widows marked the formation of the greatest female comedy team of the era when Blondell joined forces with Glenda Farrell. Not yet dubbed the "Gimme Girls," they more or less earn that epithet here. Widows establishes the template for future Blondell-Farrell films with Glenda as the more hard-boiled and mercenary of the two and Joan as more of a softie and a romantic. They're usually indistinguishably hard-boiled at the start of a story, as they are here as showgirls down on their luck. Glenda has been fined five bucks, a big chunk of her weekly pay, for scratching her itchy back on stage. Joan has been suspended without pay for a week because she wouldn't go to a "smoker" in Passaic and "show them something." The wolf, or at least the landlady is at the door -- but the old lady isn't after the rent today. Instead, she announces that a former co-worker has come to see the girls. They fear the worst, that their old colleague has come to touch them for money they can't spare. They're shocked to find she's struck it rich by going to Cuba and luring a rich American tourist into a breach-of-promise trap with the help of a trusty shyster. Naturally our girls see that the road to riches goes through Havana, but they need a grubstake. They decide to put the touch on their old pal at her hotel, but when they see a long line of showgirls with the same thought in mind they decide to seek alternate financing. Fortunately, Glenda's dolt of a boyfriend (Allen Jenkins) is the bodyguard and good-luck charm of a local gangster. The girls convince Jenkins to come up with the $1,500 to set themselves up in Cuba as the titular widows, albeit by telling him that Joan has to pay for a relative's operation in Kansas; he comes up with it by borrowing from his boss. Jenkins can't lay off the roulette wheel, however, and promptly loses all the money. Luckily, insurance salesman Hobart Bosworth has alternate financing for Jenkins: if the dumb lug will take out a life insurance policy, Bosworth will kick him back $1,500 out of the big commission he'll earn. Jenkins delivers the money but sees a newspaper headline about a notorious forger and starts to worry.

The girls promptly blow their roll on clothes and a fancy hotel room while they hunt for men. They're plagued by a drunk who keeps coming into their suite to use their door latch as a bottle opener. This lush turns out to be Duffy the shyster (Frank McHugh), who when functional helps the girls entrap a suspicious Guy Kibbee, even as Joan falls for Kibbee's son (Lyle Talbot). Time is running out, however, since Jenkins has figured out where the girls have actually gone, following them to Cuba so he can get his money back to repay his boss, who follows Jenkins to the island in turn. This sets up a would-be farcical slapstick finish -- highlighted by Kibbee's infantile panic at the prospect of a "Frame-up!!" -- but Havana Widows isn't really that perfectly plotted. Intended as a showcase for almost the entire comedy division of the Warner Bros. stock company (Hugh Herbert is conspicuously missing, though some might not miss him) as well as launching the Blondell-Farrell team, it has a few too many characters to juggle and not enough motivation to keep all the balls in the air. What makes it worth watching is the comic chemistry of the Gimme Girls. Here are two actresses who did not benefit from the supposed female empowerment, as described by David Denby in his recent New Yorker essay, that allegedly came with Code Enforcement and the rise of the romantic comedy. Blondell and Farrell may not be feminist role models in their capacity as gold diggers, but their main job was to be funny together, and in that capacity they're outstanding. For what it's worth, like many a Depression film Widows is grounded in economic reality and the struggle to get by, if not get ahead. It might have been more admirable in retrospect if the girls decided to start a business for themselves instead of gold digging, but they're characters in a comedy and the idea was to make people laugh at the lengths other people might take to find economic security and some comfort in their lives. The Gimme Girls have no less spunk or sand for trying to land a sugar daddy (though neither does in the end) than if they'd tried something more honorable, and their way is simply funnier in a way their audience appreciated.

Pre-Code Parade: SIDE SHOW (1931)

This Roy Del Ruth comedy has one of the most transgressive images in Pre-Code cinema, at least in retrospect. It's Winnie Lightner, Warner Bros.' musical-comedy heroine of early talkies, in both male drag and blackface playing a "Wild Man of Borneo" and looking alarmingly like a cartoon come to life, complete with top hat, grass skirt and oversized slap shoes. That was entertainment back in the day, and to be honest it's funny seeing her in the latest role this jill-of-all-work has to take on in her ongoing effort to keep Col. Gowdy's Big City Circus running, especially when the "Hey, Rube!" call goes out and she has to wade with her rubber club and help fend off rowdies trying to wreck the show. And before the mayhem breaks out there's a genuinely surreal moment when Charles Butterworth, playing a barker among his many circus roles, introduces her, promising an important announcement, his own top hat in hand. Butterworth drops the hat -- and it shatters, triggering a monologue of grunts from Lightner, after which she resumes smoking her cigar. I think I found it the more hilarious because it's appalling, and in story terms it illustrates the extremes Lightner will go to to save the circus. We've already seen her as a hula dancer, a living painter, a barker (in drag) and a (in moustache if not full drag) a "fire diver" who has to set herself on fire and dive from a high platform into a pool of fire. A stuntperson actually does this, which I mention not to disparage Lightner but simply to wonder that anyone does it. And yet a more spectacular stunt shot follows immediately. Butterworth's character, who pines after Lightner the whole picture, has followed her up the ladder to encourage her, and has stopped partway down the ladder to watch the dive. He applauds so enthusiastically that he falls off the ladder and joins Lightner in the pool. Again, a stuntman does this, by which I mean a stuntman does this, and Del Ruth gets a perfect shot from behind the stuntman on the ladder. This really is a nicely shot film (Devereaux Jennings was the cinematographer) with many spectacular shots, from the mass brawl at the circus to a scene in which Lightner chases some jerk into a passenger car on the circus train, pounding him with a pillow that explodes with feathers that fill the screen as her victim runs toward the camera. I read that this was one of those pictures that was cut to ribbons because it had been a full musical at the point when audiences had tired of the genre, so the songs had to go, but while Side Show is admittedly episodic it doesn't really strike me as a mutilated film.

Side Show describes the Lightner character's vocation and her self-image. Pat has sacrificed her own ambitions, both personal and professional, to prop up the drunkard Col. Gowdy (Guy Kibbee) and longs for a life and a man of her own. The man is Joe Palmer, and since he's played by Donald Cook, best known as Jimmy Cagney's damaged-vet brother in The Public Enemy, he doesn't seem that promising. Worse, once Pat's younger sister Irene (Evalyn Knapp) shows up, Joe falls for her and they eventually run off together. The film contrives a happy ending when Joe returns for Pat, having hooked Irene up with a younger guy, but I think we can indulge the contrivance, because Pat deserves a break after all she's gone through. She definitely doesn't deserve to end up with Sidney, the Butterworth character -- and I don't say that to disparage Butterworth, since I actually dig the actor. How to describe him. Physically, think of Stan Laurel as a bipolar version of Butterworth. In terms of personality, Butterworth is what Buster Keaton should have become in talkies. Butterworth was actually billed as a "dead-pan" comic a la Keaton, defined by an imperturbable absurdity. If the cuts to the film had any consequence, it was to give Butterworth more of an opportunity to steal the film from Lightner, but they actually make a neatly-contrasted comic team, his pixilated placidity balancing her manic antics. The best-such moment, and a runner-up for Pre-Code Moment of the picture, comes when Lightner, disguised as the disgruntled fire diver, is stopped on her way to the center ring by the local sheriff, who's on hand to make sure the circus doesn't defraud the public. He wants to chat with the diver but Lightner isn't going to risk imitating a foreign man's voice, so she lapses into a gibberish sign language with many conspicuous thrusts of fingers into hand-made holes. Butterworth translates: "He asks how's your home life." Butterworth has all kinds of small moments that get big laughs, just as Lightner gets big laughs with big moments. I could describe more but I don't want to overrate Side Show as a comic masterpiece. It is the first time I've really appreciated Lightner's brash versatility, which probably would have made her a huge star today. In her own time, Side Show already finds her past her peak of popularity. She retired in 1934, but there's a sort of happy ending, since she married Roy Del Ruth, who did right by her here and thereafter.

BATMAN V. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (2016) in SPOILERVISION

Medical science remains uncertain whether a cure exists for "superhero fatigue," but 2016 has offered two rival remedies. One is the R-rated irreverent black comedy, manufactured by Twentieth Century-Fox as Deadpool and by Warner Bros. (for release later this year) as Suicide Squad. The other is the DC Cinematic Universe, which actually has the R-rated irreverent black comedy remedy built into it but is prescribed initially on the theory that superhero fatigue is really Marvel fatigue; offer something different from Marvel Studios' now-familiar product, the theory goes, and the problem is solved. Each remedy comes with the usual list of potential side effects, the most daunting of which, should you consider taking Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, is "no fun." This warning is issued by people who seem more certain about what fun is than they should be. When they talk and write about fun in movies, they often mean what should be fun, or what we should consider fun. If I say I had fun watching Dawn of Justice some may judge me depraved or write my opinion off as that of an uncritical comic book fan. But I can just as easily say that many reviewers who haven't had fun at the movie didn't want to have fun, or didn't want to have the sort of fun the film offers. How can you tell? If a reviewer says the two main action sequences run on too long, you know they're not having the fun Dawn of Justice is selling. Now, if they want to complain about stuff running on too long, they should focus on after the big fight scenes, when director Zack Snyder succumbs to epic-itis, the inability to actually end a movie succinctly (see also The Lord of the Rings; The Return of the King, so notorious a case that we could call this condition Jacksonitis). Dawn really does terminate interminably without really setting things up for future films any better than the film had already. That's criticism, folks, and there will be more below, because Dawn, to be honest, has some serious flaws. But it succeeds, or so I think, in establishing a cinematic brand different in tone and scale from what seems by now an over-familiar Marvel product that will next be seen, ironically enough, imitating the perceived essence of the DC film with a desperation justified only by Marvel's historic perception of itself as No. 2 to DC. If Dawn is being judged unfavorably for not being like a Marvel film -- in fact, Dawn may help us clarify what makes Marvel work in its particular way -- then it's a strange moment for Marvel to squander its advantage by aping the competition with heroes fighting heroes.

Marvel certainly tells its stories with more clarity than Snyder, David S. Goyer and Ben Affleck's personal writer Chris Terrio do in Dawn of Justice. I don't recall any Marvel leaving you as uncertain for any period of time of what exactly is going on as Dawn dares to. The connection between Lois Lane's (Amy Adams) African misadventure and the main plot remains mysterious for quite a while, for instance, though one can guess that it has something to do with Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg), who's in a race with Bruce Wayne (Affleck) to acquire a large hunk of Kryptonian mineral that dropped into the Indian Ocean during the events of Man of Steel. Both billionaires want the stuff for the same reason; they want to be able to kill Superman (Henry Cavill). For Wayne it's personal -- when is it not with this guy? -- because a Wayne Financial building in Metropolis was a casualty, along with most of its occupants, of the big fight between Superman and the hostile Kryptonians from the last picture. But it's also a matter of principle; someone with Superman's power is inherently a threat to the world as far as Wayne, an embittered twenty-year veteran of apparently futile crimefighting, is concerned.

Luthor's motivation is harder to pin down. The real weakness of this film's Luthor isn't Eisenberg's manic performance but the writers' failure to give Superman's arch-enemy any agenda beyond destroying Superman. If that sounds weird, let me explain that traditionally Luthor becomes Superman's arch-enemy because Superman was sticking his nose in Luthor's business of mad science and world conquering. His objection to Superman is that Superman is in his way. But there's no sense here that Luthor has any agenda for Superman or anyone else to interfere with. Instead, like Bruce Wayne, Luthor objects to Superman on general principles, as skewed by the unfortunate upbringing Lex hints at: the abused child of a refugee from East Germany who's grown an anti-authoritarian streak of almost Miltonic intensity. "The demons come from the sky," he says, thinking of Kryptonians, yet he thinks of Superman, resentfully, as a God to be overcome by man -- either himself or possibly Batman, so long as mutual destruction is assured -- or by "the devil," by which he means Doomsday, the imperfect clone of General Zod (and hence, to make him three classic villains in one, a Bizarro) further tainted with Luthor's own blood to make obvious that the "devil" is a surrogate or projection of Luthor himself. That's a thin margin of differentiation between Luthor and Bruce Wayne, who may as well be co-villains for most of the picture given Wayne's increasingly pigheaded opposition to Superman, only dimly reflected by reporter Clark Kent's obsession (also arguably a form of projection) with denouncing "the Gotham Bat," whose practice of branding defeated enemies doesn't seem enough to make him a monster in Clark's eyes unless you see Kent's disapproval as an urgent way of saying "That's not me!" I'm not sure it's a good thing to go through most of the picture letting people ask what the difference is between Wayne and Luthor, and it's probably even worse to have the crucial difference emerge in as corny a way as the writers conceive -- it has all too much with the heroes' mothers having the same first name. But the story of the film is Wayne's change of mind, so of necessity he has to start in a dark place where Luthor must remain. In the end, the difference between the two is that Wayne never sees Superman as "God" -- in fact he implicitly sees the Kryptonian as less than human before reconciling with him -- while Luthor, who does see Superman that way, feels compelled to play the devil. But a person could watch the film and see Luthor as a jittery idiot-savant. Since Luthor has a stance rather than an agenda, Eisenberg is left with little to work with but mannerisms. If he is the most-criticized actor in the picture, it's really because he's the one most ill-served by the script. But if he doesn't pull off the miracle that so often chastens the literal-minded comics fans who reflexively criticize unpredictable casting, he may have himself to blame to whatever extent that he refused to imitate the performance in The Social Network that made me, at least, confident in his capacity for Luthor.

While much of Dawn of Justice is a three-way competition of Superman, Batman and Luthor, there's a fourth party lurking at the periphery, one whom the film takes its sweet time identifying but is known to everyone thanks to the movie's generous advertising. Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) is in a race with Bruce Wayne to steal information from Luthor. Luthor has dirt on her, and in the nearest thing to an agenda he ever gets it develops that Luthor has been investigating the existence of "metahumans" all over the world. The film regrettably stops dead just before the first big fight as Diana browses Luthor's files, giving us our first glimpses of characters destined to join DC's Justice League. Diana herself, of course, is sort of a metahuman, though what gets Bruce Wayne's attention is that this hot chick -- the old horndog apparently enjoys one-night stands and claims to have known women like her (since he considers her a thief when he says this you can guess who he means) -- is over 100 years old and a veteran of World War I. Not wanting to answer questions and resenting surveillance, Diana is about to leave the country -- she's actually on the plane -- when hell breaks loose in Metropolis. That looks like a job for Wonder Woman, and Dawn of Justice does nothing better than advertise next year's Wonder Woman movie. I'd read that audiences almost everywhere break out in applause when Gal Gadot appears in full costume, and damned if that didn't happen in my theater, too. Gadot earns that applause. She was easy on the eyes before, and now she kicks ass like a goddess. Based on what I saw in the final fight, I'd like her chances with Doomsday one-on-one. And to be honest with you, it seems pointless to have the final fight end the way it actually does -- remember, this is Spoilervision! -- with Superman sacrificing himself by running Doomsday through with the Kryptonite spear Batman had built -- when Supes should have simply tossed that thing to Wonder Woman and let her finish the beast at relatively little risk. But I suppose the writers thought that if they were bringing in Doomsday they might as well let the other shoe drop like it did in his original 1990s comics. Don't worry, though; Superman's inevitable return is foreshadowed at the end of the picture.

As for Wonder Woman, the only way her solo debut can fail after this build-up is if the period setting -- a generation earlier than her canonical appearance in Man's World, motivated most likely by a reluctance to look like Captain America: The First Avenger -- renders her adventures anticlimactic after Dawn of Justice's epochal battle. For now, I'd like to think a star is born, but if Gadot steals the picture without really being challenged as an actor, the rest of the cast (arguably excepting Eisenberg) hold up their tentpoles admirably. Affleck brings unprecedented intensity to Bruce Wayne, compared to Michael Keaton's introversion, Christian Bale's role-playing and the hopelessness of the two other guys, while his stuntmen deliver the energetic, acrobatic Batman fans have longed to see in earlier tech-obsessed movies. He also has an excellent unpretentious Alfred in Jeremy Irons. While Affleck may get more screen time than Henry Cavill, this is still a Superman movie at heart, and Cavill gives the film that heart, as well as a conscience. As well, kudos to the filmmakers for finding stuff for Amy Adams to do and recognizing that in the scrum of super powers and super wealth Lois Lane remains as canonical and important a figure as any of the heroes.

Dawn of Justice is a far more digressive, self-indulgent (and, yes, self-important) movie than anything Marvel has made.It gets downright eccentric with its preoccupation with dreams and premonitions. Bruce Wayne gets several dream sequences (Clark Kent gets one, sort of), some of which seem intended to be prophetic, most notoriously the dystopian desert scene with soldiers wearing Superman shields, supported by what look like parademons from the evil planet Apokolips, and even Luthor, in his last scene, lapses into prophetic mode, warning that "the bell has been rung" for Someone out there to hear. Awkward moments like these have inspired fresh appreciation for Marvel's efficiency and clarity, but I wonder whether those positive qualities have made Marvel Studios pictures too formulaic for their own good, or recognizably formulaic enough to induce superhero fatigue, in reviewers if not in audiences. Compared to Marvel movies Dawn is a loose baggy monster, but as with Man of Steel Zack Snyder invests the film with a wild, raw power that no Marvel movie, even with the Hulk rampaging, has achieved. The best thing Dawn did to differentiate itself from the Avengers films was to make its final battle a fight with one mega-powerful antagonist instead of having the DC "trinity" plow through faceless video game-style hordes of inhuman aliens or robots. The fight with Doomsday brings Dawn closer to the kinetic energy of authentic comic-book action than ever -- the titular fight has its moments, both impressive and silly, but is eclipsed by the final battle -- and that may be what reviewers don't like about it: the duration, the refusal to be glib, etc. That would be funny, if true. Ever since Man of Steel came out, debates have raged in comics fandom over whether it was true to DC Comics or not, the film's decision to have Superman kill Zod coming in for inquisitorial criticism. Ever since Marvel rolled out its cinematic universe, fans have tried to explain why DC didn't do it first instead of compartmentalizing Batman and Superman movies, aborting every attempt at a "universe" until Marvel had shown the possibility and profitability of doing that. Fans often complain that the current management at Warner Bros. and DC Comics, not to mention Zack Snyder, David S. Goyer and perhaps even Christopher Nolan of not understanding or respecting comic books and superheroes. It would be supremely and, yes, grimly ironic if word of mouth ends up killing Dawn of Justice at the box office after its critic-proof opening weekend because it is, if nowhere near the best superhero movie, arguably, the movie that's truest in design and spirit to superhero comics.

Pre-Code Parade: A MODERN HERO (1934)

G. W. Pabst was as cosmopolitan a director as the early-talkie period produced. The German director of late-silent classics like Pandora's Box didn't want to lose his international standing with the coming of sound. So like the Hollywood studios he made multiple versions in different languages of several of his early talking films. He also became a cinematic nomad, leaving Germany with the rise of Hitler, the Nazis being no fans of his Threepenny Opera or Kameradschaft, to make films in France. It was probably inevitable that he would follow fellow German geniuses Ernst Lubitsch and Friedrich W. Murnau to Hollywood. The Pre-Code period probably was the best time to cross over, and Warner Bros. probably was the ideal studio for Pabst. Warners assigned him an adaptation of Louis Bromfield's 1932 best-selling novel A Modern Hero. I can't help wondering if that was because the novel's hero starts in a circus, since German cinema made a lot of circuses. Modern Hero traces a singular rise-and-fall character arc as Pierre Radier (Richard Barthelmess) rises from bareback rider to automobile tycoon, loving and leaving ladies along the way and changing his name to Paul Rader to better fit into the upper crust. While the women in his life are disposable, he retains a soft spot for the boy he left behind, the one he sired in a one-night stand with starstruck Joanna Ryan (Jean Muir) in Pentland back in his circus days. His ambition is twofold: to make a name for himself and to give the boy, who only knows him as a friendly patron at first, all the opportunities he missed in his youth. As for the women, Pierre's mother (Marjorie Rambeau), a maimed animal tamer turned alkie fortune teller, sums it up for another of her boy's paramours by saying, "Being a woman ain't much fun, is it?"

There's a frankness about Pierre's sexual adventures that's part Pabst, part Pre-Code, and by the standards of rise-and-fall melodrama Modern Hero is admirably understated until the final reel, when it goes completely off the rails. The script (if not the novel) arranges for Paul Rader to lose his fortune to a bad investment and his son to a car wreck all in one day. We're invited to see this as some sort of comeuppance as Paul, on a train ride back to Pentland, relives his mistakes as flashbacks that recede to the horizon as the train moves on. It looked like a set-up for suicide to me, but the film ends on such a preposterous note that I find it hard to believe that Pabst himself filmed it. Paul goes looking for his mom but is told that "Madame Azais" has moved away. She hasn't quite, however, and instead we get a sentimental reunion in which the mother, who hasn't yet started drinking ("I'm bad when I'm drunk" she told a customer earlier), reassures her boy that all may have been for the best, since now Pierre presumably knows the difference between what's worthwhile and what isn't. Mother and son decide to start over in Europe, Pierre promising to become worthy of his mom. That looks like Pre-Code covering its tracks -- the film was an April 1934 release, so Code Enforcement was no excuse -- but very little like Pabst, who himself went back to Europe, and eventually back to Nazi Germany, after Modern Hero failed at the box office. Trade papers reported that he'd sign with RKO, but nothing came of that, and with Code Enforcement coming Pabst's window of opportunity to do anything worthwhile in Hollywood was closing fast.

The most interesting thing about A Modern Hero is Richard Barthelmess's performance. Pierre Radier is supposed to be a serial seducer but Pabst gets Barthelmess to give a coolly introverted performance, toning down his regional accent to achieve a soulless flatness. Despite how that all sounds, it's actually one of Barthelmess's most relaxed performances in talkies. The one problem with it is that the role presumes a certain irresistible quality in Radier/Rader, while Barthelmess, once a beautiful youth, is definitely starting to go sour inside at age 38. Hero was his last film but one for Warner Bros. It may be regrettable that Pabst didn't get to work with the real stars of the Warners stock company, but for Pabst's purposes a more naturalistic acting style than Cagney or Robinson or Muni practiced was required, and to his credit and the film's Barthelmess delivered the goods. In the end A Modern Hero is a failure, too short on the melodrama that fuels its genre until there's way too much, but for the most part it's a worthwhile failure, i.e. a failure worth a look.

DVR Diary: LITTLE BIG SHOT (1935)

The thinking at Warner Bros. seemed to go like this: Shirley Temple went over big in Little Miss Marker, which is sort of a gangster film; Warner Bros. does gangster films better than anyone else; so all we need is to find our own Shirley Temple, make our own Little Miss Marker and laugh all the way to the bank. The find was Sybil Jason, a 7 year old (billed as 5) out of South Africa. The result is a transitional picture from the first full year of Code Enforcement, with some of the old violence but also a distinct softening if not neutering of Warners assets as the studio scrambles to imitate successful trends elsewhere.

Our heroes are two sidewalk peddlers: Robert Armstrong sells cheap watches whenever the coast is clear from cops, while Edward Everett Horton is his shill, putting on as many disguises as time allows to talk up the product. They're having trouble making the rent at their quite-comfortable looking room, but they can depend on conning desk clerk Edgar Kennedy by appealing to his sporting blood and getting him to make sucker bets. That lets them keep their room but they still have to resort to stealing milk bottles from their neighbor (Glenda Farrell) for breakfast. A random encounter with a prosperous-looking old acquaintance (Addison Richards) makes them confident that they can touch him up for a "business loan" and dinner at a swank hotel. The man has his daughter Gloria with him (Jason), whom he's recently brought home from schooling abroad -- hence her British accent. Naturally to butter up the mark Armstrong talks about how much he loves kids and wishes he had one of his own to spoil. The mark believes every word of it. He wants to believe because, as he admits at the last minute, before he's gunned down on the sidewalk by J. Carroll Naish, he's actually penniless and wants Armstrong and Horton to take care of Gloria. Our heroes witness the shooting -- Gloria stayed inside the restaurant -- but Naish intimidates them into keeping quiet. Not wanting to get mixed up in things any further, they head back home, leaving the body and its daughter behind.

Little did they realize that another tenant of their building is a waiter at the hotel who promptly delivers them the bill and Gloria. Naturally, they want to dump her in an orphanage as soon as possible, but she's grown attached to Armstrong and, inevitably, he can't bring himself to abandon her. Farrell takes a motherly interest in the girl that promises dividends for Armstrong, but more importantly Gloria proves her own money-making potential by spontaneously joining some black street entertainers for a song and dance. Our heroes rent space in a penny arcade owned by Jack LaRue for Gloria to perform in while they sell their watches, but LaRue is under pressure from the same gangsters (also including Ward Bond) who killed Gloria's dad and now kick Gloria's dog to death for interfering in a high-stakes pinball game. When LaRue welshes on a dice game intended as a practical joke that backfires on him, Armstrong threatens to kill him. When the rival gangsters do kill LaRue, Armstrong practically frames himself. Add the inevitable kidnapping of Gloria and you can probably write the end of this picture yourself -- but remember that this is the Code Enforcement era, so a happy ending is mandatory.

First of all, Little Big Shot turns Glenda Farrell, perhaps Warners' apex-predator gold-digger, into a goody-good constantly nagging Armstrong to find a real job and settle down. Both Armstrong and Horton turn into soda-jerks under her prodding, and in the happy ending they all run a roadside diner together. Farrell as a goody-good is all wrong; it's like keeping hellfire under a bushel. But the real problem with the picture is Sybil Jason. I hate to sound like a xenophobe, but her accent is immediately off-putting. However unfairly, it makes her seem artificial. Worse, her singing and dancing is feeble compared to Shirley Temple, whose talent and charisma at a like age were simply freakish. Jason tries to prove herself multi-talented by doing impersonations, including an obvious Garbo and what I guess was a Mae West, though I'm not 100% sure. Worst of all is her acting, though part of the problem is how often the story forces her to burst into tears that inspire horror rather than compassion. One dreads imagining what director Michael Curtiz, who does all in his considerable power to energize the picture, did to draw those tears from the poor girl. There's no hint of spontaneity in Jason, just as there's really no hint of originality in the picture. It was one thing to declare Jason Temple's rival, another to invite damning comparisons by imitating a Temple vehicle. Whatever her true potential, Jason paid the price for this miscalculation. Warners only starred her in one more feature, two years later, and otherwise put her in supporting roles before letting her go to finish her career as a supporting player to Shirley Temple herself. Maybe this was a waste of talent, but after seeing Little Big Shot I doubt it was that much of a waste.