DVR Diary: WINGS (1927)

On the day of the latest Academy Awards ceremony I rewatched the first ever Best Picture, William Wellman's World War I flying epic. Wings was one of two "best pictures" that year, officially recognized as the "outstanding production" of 1927-8 while F. W. Murnau's Sunrise received the first and only award for "unique and artistic" effort. Film buffs today regard the Murnau as the superior film and I'd most likely agree with them, but the distance between the two pictures really isn't as great as some may think. Both films are spectacles showing silent film at its peak of technical virtuosity, and both have plenty of corny moments. If Sunrise showed what a proven expressionist master could do with a Hollywood budget, Wings is arguably more of a revelation because Wellman really hadn't done anything distinguished before. Finally matched with the right subject, the young director went at it with every trick in the book and achieved unprecedented and arguably unmatched effects. While it flaunts supremely mobile late-silent camerawork and attacks the air war from almost every possible angle, Wings is above all the ultimate statement of silent cinema's primitive authenticity. Richard Arlen and Charles "Buddy" Rogers literally take to the air for the film's dogfights, and even jaded modern audiences are likely to be captivated if not awestruck by the unmistakable reality of it.

Arlen and Rogers are the leads in the film's tragic bromance of frenemies. They're from the same town, where David Armstrong (Arlen) is a privileged rich boy and Jack Powell (Rogers) is a car enthusiast. Both pine for rich girl Sylvia Lewis (Harold Lloyd leading lady Jobyna Ralston), but Jack does so almost as a matter of one-upmanship with David, and in spite of the obsessive attention paid him by his neighbor Mary, his neglect of her all the more inexplicable by the fact that Mary is played by top-billed "It" girl and legendary sex symbol Clara Bow. Maybe Mary comes on too strong, as Bow often does in her films. She does score a point with Jack by naming his homemade race car "the Shooting Star" and creating a logo he'll also use on his fighter plane.

The audience will be all for Bow because Mary also enlists, joining the motor corps as an ambulance driver. There's a scene nearly midway through the film that may remind today's moviegoers of Wonder Woman's exploits in a French village, down to the climactic destruction of a church steeple. Of course, all Mary can do is cower under her truck as that steeple crashes down point first almost on top of her, provoking what probably was some salty language from our star, though my lip-reading isn't good enough to verify it. As an aside, there's at least one "Son of a bitch!" during a dogfight scene that absolutely no one will miss. In any event, Mary's really big adventure takes place in Paris (some actual second-unit shooting was done there), where she's tasked with dragging a sozzled Jack from a bar because his leave's been cancelled. This is part of the scene that includes a famous tracking shot including two lesbians at a table, for what that's worth to you. On one hand, this is one of the film's dumbest scenes, sinking to the level of idiot comedy as Jack becomes obsessed with champagne bubbles and begins hallucinating them everywhere in special-effect form. On the other, the whole bubble business has a brilliant payoff when Mary, having changed from her chic uniform into a sequined cocktail gown to get Jack's attention, shimmies a blizzard of bubbles at him that finally wins him away from a predatory French woman. Of course, he's so stinking drunk that he never recognizes her through the whole experience, finally passing out in a hotel room just before some MPs show up to arrest Mary in mid-change back into her uniform. Her war ends with the grim irony of dismissal for immoral conduct, and when Jack reads about her "resignation" in a hometown paper, still none the wiser about Paris, he remarks that Mary didn't seem like the quitting type.

It's remarkable that Wings made Buddy Rogers a star when Jack is such an obnoxious character. Not only does he treat Mary like dirt, only to win her at the very end of the picture, and not only does he delude himself about Sylvia when she really loves David (as Ralston did Arlen), but on top of everything else he kills David. Not intentionally, mind you, or not in the "I want to kill David" sense, but because, believing David dead behind enemy lines, he goes on a berserker rage during the big American push, breaking from his formation to go on a solo rampage against any German plane he can find. So of course David has survived, and of course he steals a German plane in a desperate effort to get back to his own lines, and of course Jack isn't going to realize that it's his buddy in a German plane flying toward the American lines. This is all a big tragedy, of course, but Wellman takes it beyond tragedy to outright horror, milking David's hopeless helplessness for all it's worth as he knows exactly who's after him from the shooting star logo on the pursuing plane. This isn't a moment of valorous resignation but a sustained fit of despairing terror, and Arlen makes the most of it. Sure, the boys reconcile before David finally expires, after he's shot down and crashes into a house, but while Wellman strives to restore a sentimental tone -- the symbolic cut to a plane's propellers slowing to a halt outside a military ceremony is a nice touch echoed in the epilogue by Sylvia's mournful stillness in the swing she and  David used to swing on -- that play for pathos can't erase the memory of one of the most terrifying moments in all silent film, all the more terrifying, of course, for knowing that Arlen is up in the clouds, theoretically as helplessly vulnerable as the character he plays.

It's quite an achievement by both Wellman and Arlen that that scene of one man in peril is so memorable after some massively detailed scenes of land and air battle, nearly as definitive as the trench warfare scenes from All Quiet on the Western Front. Wings is more of a patchwork than that film, with wider variance in tone than Sunrise, to return to the original 1927 comparison, in an effort to please every part of the audience. Somehow it's a film that elevated everyone involved, including Gary Cooper in his famous few minutes as a doomed trainee pilot. Wellman knew star power when he saw it, and while Cooper doesn't have quite the godlike emergence here that James Cagney gets in Wellman's Other Men's Women, you can tell from the way the director dissolves to a closer shot of Cooper as he prepares to leave his tent for the last time that the young actor would make an indelible impression. But hell, this film even elevated El Brendel. Brendel really became a big deal in talkies, when his Swedish accent was judged inherently hilarious, if nothing else about him was. What on earth did he have to offer in silent film? Apparently Wellman found his face funny, having used him in an earlier picture, and in the meantime silence freed the presumptive comedian from the confines of his own shtick, so that here he can play a German-American, Herman Schwimpf, who has to fend off disdain for his enemy ethnicity by displaying an American flag tattoo on his bicep. Apart from that, he gets beat up during an aggressive demonstration of hand-to-hand combat and is forgotten about for most of the rest of the picture until he turns up firing an anti-aircraft gun before the climactic battle. He was there for someone's benefit, I guess, though I'd wonder about anyone who found him the highlight of the film. He's what you get when you try to have something for everyone in a movie, and that just goes to prove that Wings is more -- far more -- than the sum of its parts. Parts of this film are probably still the best air-war movie ever made.

DVR Diary: THE IRON CURTAIN (1948)

William Wellman's red-scare drama for Twentieth Century-Fox has one of the most interesting soundtracks of the 1940s. Alfred Newman conducted and presumably curated a selection of themes duly credited to contemporary Soviet composers: Prokofiev, Shostakovich, etc. The idea seems to have been to craft a background musical portrait of Soviet communism. The music in the picture is both diegetic and non-diegetic. For laymen, that means some of the Soviet music is simply soundtrack (non-diegetic) and some is heard by the characters in the story. For instance, in the cipher office where Igor Gouzenko (Dana Andrews) works, music blares at all times for security reasons, so that people can't hear anything in adjoining offices. Later, another character hears a snatch of Shostakovich and identifies it as the first stirring of proletarian culture. For a non-diegetic example, during a moment of moral crisis Gouzenko hears voices from earlier scenes in the picture while we hear a particularly hellish bit from Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony. Throughout, the Soviet music is strident, turbulent, frenetic. The Iron Curtain soundtrack is a Fantasia of totalitarian themes and terror. Depending on your taste in classical music, it may be a more effective argument against Stalinism than the film itself.

The historic Iron Curtain was located by Winston Churchill in eastern Europe, but the Gouzenko story and the Iron Curtain movie take place in Canada. Gouzenko is assigned to the Soviet embassy in Ottowa as a cipher clerk while World War II is still in progress and the USSR is Canada's ally against Nazi Germany. The film shows the Soviets already looking ahead to a resumption of the irrepressible class struggle. Embassy workers and Canadian communists are shown recruiting people (including a member of parliament) to spy on their government and military, and later on the atomic bomb program under way in the U.S. Gouzenko is a loyal communist initially, despite an early mis-step when he recites to his new boss his actual personal background instead of the fake details that have been prepared for him. Gouzenko is warned not to make friends with Canadians, but that's no problem until his wife (Gene Tierney) is sent over to live with him. She can't help trying to make friends with neighbors, especially after their son is born. Occasionally they take walks through the city, once stopping awkwardly outside a church as hymns play inside. It's hard to tell what we're supposed to make of their apparent distress. Does the churchiness of it all disturb them in some way, or do they recognize this as something inviting yet forbidden to them? Later in the picture, an older Soviet observes that he's old enough to know what truth is, or was, while Gouzenko's generation isn't so lucky. That seems to be the screenplay's dig at Soviet atheism, but what's really subversive for the Gouzenkos is the sheer fact of family life. It makes them start to think of having lives of their own, which isn't part, apparently, of the Soviet program.

Gouzenko is increasingly uncomfortable with the embassy's involvement in atomic spying. To him and his wife it all seems to promise a new war so soon after the victory over Germany. Igor (many actors pronounce it "Eager") is also troubled by the breakdown of a colleague grown guilty over his role in state terror. That unfortunate is duly shipped back to Moscow -- it's a damning fact that no one looks forward to being recalled to the old country -- and when Igor learns that his family is to return home after he trains a replacement, the Gouzenkos make a personal decision to defect and a moral decision to expose the atomic spy network. What follows apparently follows fairly closely the events of their actual defection, which fortunately fits the framework of a "they won't believe me" thriller. The Gouzenkos are spurned by government, law enforcement and media, none of the above taking them seriously. In a historically accurate yet thematically significant detail, only when the embassy staff invades the sanctity of the Gouzenko home, having discovered his theft of damning documents, do the police take action to protect the defectors. Governments and other institutions may not be reliable, but at least our society -- Canada for this purpose being effectively an extension of the U.S. -- respects property and family when totalitarianism doesn't.

Like other anti-communist films, Iron Curtain isn't really ideological if that word leads you to expect a defense of capitalism against communism. Communism is primarily a political threat, the tyranny over humanity of a conspiratorial, paranoid party. Curtain is less a polemical or patriotic film than a kind of film noir, and while cinematographer Charles G. Clarke didn't work much in that genre he makes an effectively noirish impression here. Unfortunately, Gouzenko's story doesn't give Andrews much to work with, and Tierney gets even less, and the postwar Fox gimmick of portentous pseudo-documentary narration distances the audience further from the characters. Wellman directs anonymously; it really could have been anyone behind the camera and for all I know the job was a loyalty test like I Married A Communist was at RKO. The music really is the most interesting thing about the picture; it so overwhelms the mostly uninspired proceedings that audiences might have wondered who really had the more interesting culture. More likely they just found the music too loud.

Pre-Code Parade: LOVE IS A RACKET (1932)

William Wellman's film introduces us to an ambitious, crusading journalist who's working on an expose of a milk racket. The public may not care about bootlegging and other crimes, but the writer surmises that they'll care if they learn that gangsters are forcing up the price of milk through extortion and other measures. This would-be hero has the ear of his editor and wants the help of his paper's star gossip columnist, Jimmy Russell, who has a lot of underworld connections. Jimmy thinks the story's too dangerous, however, and his caution convinces the editor to kill it. Jimmy (Douglas Fairbanks Jr) is the hero of our story, so you can probably guess where this is going -- but since this is Pre-Code Cinema, you're probably wrong. Jimmy never does expose the milk racket, while the crusader is never shown to be other than what he seems to Jimmy: a reckless fool. He's dumb enough to call his city desk from inside a "speako" owned by head racketeer Eddie Shaw (Lyle Talbot), without realizing that one of Eddie's men is listening in upstairs. Since the crusader is still trying to get Jimmy involved in the story and mentions his name on the line, Eddie sends his head goon, the practical-joking bully Bernie (Warren Hymer) to Jimmy's apartment. Hard-boiled Jimmy isn't scared, or doesn't show it if he is, but he seems genuinely annoyed when Bernie explains why he's there and what the crusader is up to. He calls the pressroom and kills the milk-racket story -- Jimmy has Walter Winchell-like popularity and authority -- and Bernie in turn calls his men to call off a hit on the crusader. That's how things are done in the big city. Crime isn't Jimmy's business and he keeps it out of his column. He goes along to get along and really feels no regrets about it. Nor do the filmmakers expect anyone in the audience to share the crusaders' outrage over the milk racket. This is a comedy, after all -- I think.

The irony of Love is a Racket is that love is the racket that destroys Eddie Shaw. He has the hots for Mary Wodehouse (Frances Dee), the daughter and granddaughter of showgirls and Jimmy Russell's girlfriend. Mary loves Jimmy in spite of the skepticism of her grandma (Cecil "yes, it's a woman" Cunningham), an original Floradora girl, who doubts the reporter's moneymaking potential despite his rather impressive apartment. Still, Jimmy can prove useful, since he devotes his column to promoting Mary's career and hopes to land her a role in the newest production of big-time showman Max Boncur. Unfortunately, Mary is sort of living on spec and has written a number of bad checks. This is the sort of thing that gets people blackmailed, and who should end up with the bad checks but Eddie Shaw? Luring Jimmy out of town by planting a false item that he's gone to Atlantic City, Eddie expects Mary to come to his penthouse and make some sort of deal to get the bad checks back. In Atlantic City, Jimmy blunders into Eddie's trap and becomes Bernie's prisoner. Bernie is irked because he'd bet Eddie fifty bucks that no one would fall for such an obvious plant, and he takes it out on Jimmy by giving him hotfoots and setting his newspaper on fire. But Bernie gets too involved in his gags to keep Jimmy covered properly and the columnist makes his escape to set up the picture's climactic set piece.

Jimmy knows that Eddie has the checks and heads for the penthouse through a signature Wellman rainstorm. Reaching the roof, he hears gunshots, then sees a figure -- it's Mary's grandma -- dart out and dump a gun in the shrubbery before exiting. Jimmy enters the apartment to find Eddie dead. Wellman learned something about soundtrack counterpoint in The Public Enemy, when he played "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" on a record as Cagney's corpse is delivered to his ma, and he does something similar here. A radio broadcast from a jazz club plays as Jimmy discovers Eddie's body. "The show continues!" the announcer says between tunes. Realizing what's happened and its implications for Mary's future, Jimmy decides to cover up for the grandma. He pours whisky and disarranges furniture to make it look like Eddie had gone blind drunk. Then, after patting down some shrubbery, he drags Eddie's body out to hurl it down to the street. At this point, Jimmy's pal Stanley (Lee Tracy), a reporter for another paper, has shown up. Not knowing about the grandmother, he sees Jimmy lugging and dumping the corpse -- Wellman sends a dummy down and suggests the impact by showing a single shoe landing some distance from the rest of Eddie -- and draws his own conclusions. Lingering after Jimmy leaves, he also sees that Jimmy has left implicating evidence behind, but collects it to protect his friend. That's what reporters do for each other.

It's really a tragedy played as farce the first time around. Returning to the penthouse to report on Eddie's death, and not realizing what Stanley has done for him, Jimmy has a panicky moment when the cops discover a newspaper -- he had carried one with a damning phone number written on it -- and remark on their interesting discovery. It turns out to be a glamour-gal photo on the front page. The cops, being Pre-Code cops, are quite convinced that Eddie died accidentally and no one, presumably, is interested in autopsying Eddie's remains. Only after Jimmy is in the clear does Stanley give him back his own newspaper and tell what he thinks he knows. Naturally, to protect his prospective in-laws Jimmy doesn't set Stanley straight.

If all of this hasn't convinced you that love is a racket, the reporters return to Jimmy's pad with galpal Sally (Ann Dvorak), only to receive a telegram -- Jimmy fears worse when the buzzer rings -- announcing Mary Wodehouse's wedding to Max Boncur. This news inspires a tirade in which Jimmy states the theme and title of the picture and vows to get out of this particular racket for good, only to be stopped short when he finally sees in Sally's eyes what we and Stanley have seen all along. Jimmy doesn't exactly capitulate immediately, but his closing acknowledgment of Sally as "you racketeer" has a here-we-go-again tone that suggests a sequel we'll never see.

A case can be made for Fairbanks Jr. as a definitive male Pre-Code star if only because his Pre-Code persona is so different from the swashbuckling star, his father's son in effect, that classic movie fans actually remember. He's a revelation practically every time I see him, and I've come to like his youthful streetwise self, the one who sounds more Noo Yawk than English, better than his sometimes campier swashbuckling self, who seems a sort of surrender to his heritage after some success creating a distinctive persona that would suddenly be forgotten. Alongside Fairbanks the then fast-rising Lee Tracy is little more than a stooge as Stanley, a character who, depending on how you look at it, is pining for Jimmy from afar as much as Sally is. Fairbanks is really playing the sort of character Tracy would specialize in at his peak of stardom, and this is the rare Pre-Code in which Tracy isn't the most charismatically amoral character on screen. Junior fits the role quite nicely, and his arc of worldy-wise cynic made stupid and reckless by love makes Love is a Racket work, in a modest way, as a somewhat dark comedy, if also a relative trifle in Wellman's torrent of filmmaking at the time.

Here's the trailer from TCM.com:

DVR Diary: THE BOOB (1926)

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was pretty well situated as well as silent comedy was concerned. The company distributed Buster Keaton's early features through Battling Butler and got him back in 1928 as a contract player. Starting in 1927, M-G-M distributed Hal Roach's short subjects starring Laurel & Hardy, Charley Chase, Our Gang, etc. At the same time, the studio attempted homegrown comedy. One of its would-be comedy stars was George K. Arthur, a sad-faced Englishman who often teamed up with tall Swede Karl Dane in buddy pictures. Arthur plays the title character in The Boob, directed by William A. Wellman a year before he hit the big time with Wings. A picture with that title could have been anything. "Boob" was H. L. Mencken's default term of disdain for the average American, who in turn more likely identified the word with Rube Goldberg's comic strip Boob McNutt. As a title for a movie The Boob is generic to the point of vagueness; it may as well have been called The Numbskull or The Moron. But to be specific, Arthur plays Peter Good, a rustic wimp losing his girl to the newcomer from the city, a slicker who's opened a roadhouse called "The Booklovers." To win the girl back, he resolves to become a hero by hunting down bootleggers, this being the time of Prohibition. His hope is that the city-slicker newcomer will be one of the bootleggers. He's encouraged in his ambition by his mentor, Cactus Jim (Charles Murray), who inspires him with tall tales of his youthful Indian fighting, and his sidekick Ham Bunn (played by an uncredited and apparently unknown young black actor). Peter's quest takes him to The Booklovers, which proves indeed to be a speakeasy with a library gimmick and has already been infiltrated by a crack Prohibition agent (20 year old Joan Crawford). Whatever her plans are, Peter comes in guns blazing in Tom Mix regalia, yelling, "I'm looking for bootleggers!" The decadent customers answer, "Oh dearie! So are we!" More or less assisted by Ham Bunn and the sozzled Cactus Jim, who salvages bottles of hooch abandoned during Peter's raid and holes up in a hollow tree, Peter eventually tracks down his rival the bootlegger, proving his manhood in a brawl in the back of a speeding car. And while the film teases that Jane the Prohibition agent will win his heart, having been the only person in the story not to think him a boob, it's still his good old girlfriend (top-billed Gertrude Olmstead) he longs for, and wins.

Low comedy was arguably the highest form of silent cinema, the sight gag its height of craftsmanship. The Boob is a semi-slapstick picture with little of the pictorial genius typical of the great silent clowns. Arthur is an unimpressive clown easily upstaged by Keystone veteran Murray. Since the star isn't really very funny, Wellman brings in another Keystone vet, Hank Mann, for some gags at The Booklovers that have nothing to do with the main story. Mann's best known as Chaplin's opponent in the City Lights boxing match but proves himself quite a competent comedian in his own right as a diner compelled by his fat girlfriend not to eat olives (or are they grapes?) with his fingers. Desperate to look respectable, Mann struggles to impale the things on his fork and later manages to scoop one onto a celery stalk, only to fall tragically short of getting it in his mouth. He's in the film for no more than five minutes, but Mann still may be the best thing in it

Throughout The Boob's 64 minutes, Wellman tries a variety of sight gags, with hit-and-miss results. He has Ham Bunn's dog Benzine lick spilled liquor from one of Cactus Jim's broken bottles and tries to sell the animal's inebriation by having him do nothing in particular, but in slow motion. Cactus Jim exhorts Peter to brave deeds by recounting his own adventures, illustrated by a lithograph on his wall. Wellman transforms the picture into a moving picture of a Hickok-like Cactus fighting off a tribe of Indians single-handedly as Peter watches like a movie-theater spectator, but there's nothing actually funny about the scene. At The Booklovers, the floor show includes remote-control strippers. They come out in hoop skirts, but by touching a button a stagehand lifts the girls' outfits to the ceiling. This makes no sense unless the girls were on wires like marionettes throughout their performance. It may have been done with air currents, however, since the stagehand teases Hank Mann's fat girlfriend by turning on the air as she leaves until her own skirts nearly lift heavenward. After the climactic car chase ends with a wreck, an injured Peter reenacts the chase in a dream. As the car races through the sky, Peter repeatedly flings the villain earthward, only to see him reappear to resume the fight. Eventually Peter's girlfriend, who was driving, faints and flops all the way out of the car, leaving our hero to careen to his doom, except that he wakes up. These bits are interesting without really being very funny. Nor does Wellman do much with a pathos angle that develops when Peter aids an impoverished old lady who later nurses him after the car crashes into her old-folks' home. The old lady seems to be in the picture only because comedy was supposed to have pathos in it back then. Overall, The Boob demonstrates (as M-G-M would again once it took creative control of Keaton's career) how hard it was for an otherwise super-efficient studio with plenty of talent on hand (Crawford is wasted in a merely functional role) to equal the output of the lone-wolf auteurs of silent comedy. Posterity has separated the wheat from the chaff; while the vast majority of the films of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon etc. survive, many if not most of the studio comedies are lost. At least The Boob survives to represent the others that didn't make history's cut, and to make clear how exceptional the truly great comedies really were.

Pre-Code Parade: THE STAR WITNESS (1931)

Three generations of a family gather at a dinner table for a round of domestic comedy. The wastrel son disparages dad's bookkeeping job; the youngest boy craves beans. A doddering grandpa shows up on "furlough" from the National Soldiers' Home; the small ones idolize him while the grown-ups find him and his Civil War stories and his playing on the fife tiresome. Outside, a William Wellman movie breaks out. Two big cars are engaged in a gangland gun battle in the middle of a rainy evening until they spin and skid to a halt. Two desperate men race toward the retreating camera as Maxie Campo (Ralph Ince) guns them down. One of the victims flops in the gutter, Public Enemy-style. Now the cops are on their way, so Maxie and his boys have to get away. They cut through the family's apartment building, through their very apartment, Maxie pausing to deck the old codger when he gets too crotchety.

The cops have little trouble following Maxie's trail, and the Leeds family is happy to tell their story to the crusading district attorney (Walter Huston). They soon regret their glibness. While Maxie gets arrested and faces a capital trial for the shootings, his head goon Big Jack (Nat Pendleton) knows that the d.a. is likely to put the Leeds brood on the stand. He does all he can to dissuade the family. He offers the father (Grant Mitchell) a $1,000 bribe, or a paid vacation for the whole family. When Leeds spurns the bribe, Jack tries the hard sell. Soon he has Leeds by the legs, practically slamming him through the wall of his hideout before dumping the wretched man in a ditch under a bridge. Leeds is lucky to be alive, but in case the family didn't get the message, Big Jack has one of the younger boys kidnapped on his way to a baseball game. Defying a police dragnet, Jack tells the family that the boy will die if any of them testify against Maxie. That shuts everyone up, despite the d.a.'s threat to jail them for contradicting their earlier sworn statements. Everyone clams up, except for the old man. He goes off on a rant about "foreigners" taking over the country and how good Americans need to stand up to them the way he stood up for the Union way back when. When the family reminds him of the boy's peril, he reminds them that everyone's life is in danger while the "foreigners" run loose. Then he goes about tracking down the boy after the police have failed.

While Turner Classic Movies aired Star Witness to spotlight Dickie Moore, who plays the youngest boy, on his 88th birthday, Walter Huston gets top billing in the actual picture yet is overshadowed by the "And" billing for the actor playing the old veteran, Charles "Chic" Sale. Wellman's Star Witness is a recycling of the title, if not a remake of the plot of a Movietone short Sale had made in 1928. Sale had already made a name for himself making old codgers by the ripe age of 46, when he appeared in Wellman's film; perhaps ironically, he was only 51 when he died. While the Star Witness short was advertised as a comedy, Wellman's feature has a split personality. Sale is essentially a comic figure, even while he serves as a mouthpiece for nativist outrage, but Wellman arguably (and perhaps necessarily)overcompensates for the comedic element with a high level of brutality, including not just the beating Pendleton inflicts on Mitchell, but also some rough handling of George Ernst as the kidnapped boy. He emphasizes the contrast with stark crosscutting between Mitchell's ordeal and scenes of the family waiting to serve him dinner at home. Later, he merges the streams and makes the film a thriller as Sale conducts his improbable search. It's like Hitchcock directing Gabby Hayes as Sale stalks the neighborhood where Ernst is thought to be held, playing his fife in the street in the hope that Ernst will hear it wherever he is. The comedy never fully goes away; a passing woman gives Sale a penny as if he were a panhandler. But Wellman gradually ratchets up the suspense level, intercutting Sale's march with scenes of Ernst with his captors, including a friendly gangster and fellow baseball fan who shows the boy the grip for a fancy pitch. You can see what's going to happen, and your anticipation of what the kid will do with the ball when he hears the fife is what we call suspense.

Wellman keeps up the pressure even after the ball goes through the window, since Sale has to convince people of what the ball means, and he isn't exactly the most convincing person at first glance. Some of the police are looking for him ever since he slipped his handler in the courthouse restroom, but others don't know him from any other coot on the lam from the soldiers' home, and they're ready to stuff him in a squad car and take him away while leaving the boy to his fate. Come to think of it, Hitchcock might have taken notes from this film. I had my doubts about it when I realized it would be a vehicle for a vaudevillian coot, but it's a testament to William Wellman's instinctive sense of drama during his intensely industrious stint at Warner Bros. -- to repeat, 17 feature films between 1931 and 1933, including two for other studios and not counting uncredited work on an 18th picture -- that he makes it an entertaining drama that bears his personal stylistic stamp.

Well, jumping cornstalks! Here's the original trailer from TCM.com.

Pre-Code Parade: LILLY TURNER (1933)

You've read it here before, but it bears repeating: William Wellman was on fire in the Pre-Code era. He has as much claim as any director on the role of cinematic bard of the Great Depression. His recognized peaks of achievement in this mode are the 1933 films Heroes For Sale, tracing the ups and more-frequent downs of a World War I veteran, and Wild Boys of the Road, chronicling the travels of vagabond teenagers. Wellman's Lilly Turner isn't in the same league as those films, but it's a lively mix of grim comedy and lurid melodrama bordering on outright horror. It was a follow-up teaming of Wellman and actress Ruth Chatterton after the hit period piece Frisco Jenny. In the title role, Chatterton plays a starstruck young woman who marries a magician, expecting him to be big time star, only to find herself assistant to a small-time carny character in more ways than one. He gets her pregnant only to leave her on the fly when he's exposed as a bigamist. Lilly's only pal, the alcoholic barker Dave Dixon (Frank McHugh), steps up and marries her to make her baby legitimate, but the child dies in the hospital. Lilly's relieved; as far as she's concerned, the kid wouldn't have stood a chance in her world.

After an unhappy stint in another carnival, aborted when Lilly and Dave quit before he can be fired for his boozing -- he needs the stuff, he claims, for chronic laryngitis -- the platonic couple end up working for Doc McGill (Guy Kibbee), who rents out storefronts for "free" lectures where he sells his quack medical tracts. While Dave brings in the crowds, Lilly appears as "the perfect example of womanhood," a product of Doc's health regimen. Her male counterpart is Fritz (Robert Barrat), a Teutonic strongman prone to headaches. Both he and Doc try to hit on Lilly -- Doc tells her she "brings out the beast in me" -- with Dave hardly the wiser. Disaster strikes the show when Fritz suffers a breakdown and has to be taken to an asylum. When a cab driver slings a drugged Fritz across his shoulders to send him to the nervous hospital, everyone realizes that they have a replacement for their strongman. Bob Chandler (George Brent, aka Mr. Ruth Chatterton) actually has a degree in civil engineering and dreams of building railroads, but during hard times people aren't even using the roads that already exist. You might not think that playing strongman in a storefront medicine show would make more money than driving a cab, but Bob's new job has the added benefit of proximity to Lilly. That makes up for any shortfall, but after a while proximity isn't enough. As Bob continues to apply for engineering jobs, he pressures Lilly to dump Dave and grows jealous when he and Lilly encounter one of her old carny boyfriends. Meanwhile, Fritz breaks out of the loony bin and, still obsessed with Lilly, tracks down the medicine show. It's up to Bob and/or Dave to stand up when their woman is in peril....

With McHugh and Kibbee on hand this is a prime showcase for the WB stock company, but Chatterton quietly dominates the picture with an understated world-weariness, plus one drunk scene. She passes the good actor's test of playing a bad actor as Lilly lifelessly recites Doc McGill's patter and fails to conceal her gum-chewing indifference to the various roles he assigns her, but still commands our attention. If any character actor could claim to steal the picture, it'd be Robert Barrat as Fritz. Wellman put Barrat through his paces in 1933, casting him as a hypocritical comedy-relief Communist inventor in Heroes For Sale and a benevolent judge in Wild Boys of the Road. For Lily Turner Barrat goes berserk and Wellman milks it for all its worth. He stands out in two horrific scenes. He escapes from his cell by disassembling his bed and using a piece as a crowbar to pry apart the bars of his window, advancing toward Wellman's camera as his face contorts with the strain. When he catches up with the medicine show he flings Bob, Dave and Lilly about like rag dolls. When Dave finally jumps on his back, hopelessly trying to force him down, Fritz pries the little man loose, holding him with one hand while raising his fist for a finishing blow. Wellman holds the moment to maximize the horror as Dave begs for mercy before Fritz punches him through a window. It makes you think Barrat really missed his calling. He could have competed with Karloff for heavy roles.

Lilly Turner is an actors' picture, but Wellman gives it much-needed atmosphere, including plenty of his signature rainfall. The film is always convincingly tawdry and seedy even if it never plunges to the sociological depths of the director's other Depression epics. It may border on camp for some observers, but Warner Bros. nearly always manages to give its Pre-Code melodramas sufficient grit to keep them interesting eighty years later, while the studio's unbeatable stock company keeps them entertaining. This isn't exactly prime Wellman, but it'll do in a pinch. Here's the usual trailer from TCM.com

DVR Diary: THE GREAT MAN'S LADY (1942)

I watch far more movies than I write about, and that frustrates me sometimes. Plenty of films that I see aren't worth writing about, but that still leaves more than I can give the full Mondo 70 treatment. Some have points of interest that don't justify the whole treatment., yet deserve some sort of mention. Most of these films are titles I record on my DVR off Turner Classic Movies or, less often, Fox Movie Channel. When I finally got a DVR last fall I rejoiced over never missing a movie again, yet the thing now strikes me sometimes as an burden, simply because there's so much to record off TCM alone that I'm constantly fighting to whittle down my queue while my DVDs gather dust and promising items at the library go ignored. The least I can do is leave a more complete record of my viewing habits, and so the DVR Diary is my latest attempt at short-form reviews. There's no word limit in my head right now, but the idea is to get these done quickly and with a minimum of illustration. Let's see how I manage.

The Diary begins with one of William A. Wellman's lesser-known features, one that Robert Osborne cited for anticipating John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (or Fort Apache, for that matter) with a sort of "print the legend" finish. Osborne's point is duly noted, and I'd note some inspiration from Citizen Kane in the Wellman's ambitious art direction and the biographical gimmick, but The Great Man's Lady strikes me most as the missing link between Cimarron and Little Big Man. Like Cimarron, this film invites our sympathy for a pioneer woman whose husband goes away for long stretches of the picture, while like Little Big Man the tale is tole by a superannuated survivor of great events -- the same pioneer woman (Barbara Stanwyck) as a miraculously articulate centenarian besieged by reporters on the occasion of the unveiling of a statue to the founder of Hoyt City, Ethan Hoyt (Joel McCrea), to whom the old lady, Hannah Sempler, claims to have been married. The claim itself scandalizes the community, since it would appear to render the great and beloved Hoyt a bigamist, but Hannah's whole story, given up reluctantly to a would-be biographer who cries after her initial refusal, makes Hoyt a less heroic personality, even as Hannah confirms all his famed accomplishments. In her account, which the film itself presents as unquestionable, Ethan is often stupid, stubborn, vicious and craven, and just as often bolstered, backed up and pushed forward by Hannah's long-suffering self. The "print the legend" part comes in when Hannah and the biographer agree that Hoyt's heroic image is more useful to the community, and in the end the old lady tears up the marriage certificate that'd prove her claim while affirming her eternal love for Hoyt.

Hannah's story is a melodramatic ordeal of separations and renunciations, the pathetic climax coming when she loses her twin babies as a flood washes away a bridge with her stagecoach, a disaster that convinces Ethan of Hannah's own death and leads him to remarry. It's the sort of life story that's too bad to be true, and Wellman's play for pathos rings hollow too often. He's less interested in debunking any myth of a heroic Westerner than in honoring the ladies who stand behind every great man and every ordinary guy, according to the preface. Wellman wants to eat his cake and have it too, combining satire with patriotic epic, and the result is a little too sweet, yet unfilling. Given a hopeless role, McCrea is blown off the screen by Stanwyck in one of her first western matriarch roles. Poor McCrea effectively takes second place among males to Brian Donlevy, who plays a character type apparently dear to Wellman's heart, the honest rogue. Bruce Cabot played a rough draft of this type as the virtuous saloonkeeper in The Robin Hood of El Dorado. Here, Donlevy is a gambler and eventual casino owner -- evil incarnate in the usual Western of the period -- redeemed by his honesty (he tells customers up front that the games are rigged and they can't win) and non-violent nature. As in El Dorado, Wellman prefers the archetypal bloodsucker of melodrama to the often-ruthless pioneer, but here he goes to far to make Donleavy's gambler a self-denying saint if not a kind of Christ figure -- he's shot down by McCrea, who blames him for Stanwyck's death, only to rise again and resume his good-hearted huckstering. He could have been Stanwyck's true love but is too decent to press his claim. Arch-heel Donlevy is almost perversely cast against type in a manner that embodies this film's awkward unorthodoxy. He's the picture's unsung hero, but he still can't get the girl. Everyone else sacrifices so McCrea's character can succeed, and we're supposed to be happy for them and McCrea and the people who worship Ethan Hoyt. Maybe that was a message people wanted to see with World War II under way, but I can't help wondering whether Wellman would have made a better, more biting film a decade earlier at his Pre-Code peak.

Pre-Code Parade: THE HATCHET MAN (1932)

Pre-Code cinema is beloved by many for an almost quaint though sometimes still vital transgressiveness, but here's a Pre-Code picture that's probably more transgressive now than it was when it was released. The reason is obvious: William Wellman's movie, yet another from his torrent of work for Warner Bros., features Edward G. Robinson as a Chinese man -- and not just a man, but a "hatchet man," the designated executioner for a Chinatown tong. Apart from bit players and extras, all the speaking parts are played by white actors in "yellowface" or slant-eyed makeup, including ingenue Loretta Young. If The Hatchet Man is not quite as transgressive as, say, the Amos 'n Andy vehicle Check and Double Check, it's only because Wellman and his team aren't consciously out to mock another race. In fact, they, like the playwrights whose work The Honorable Mr. Wong they adapted, probably thought they were honoring the humanity of the Chinese people, and by the standards of their own time they probably were. Even if we can't take that pretense seriously, there's an interesting mix of ethnic stereotypes and melodramatic conventions, as well as an attempt to transcend both in a matrix of self-conscious modernity before a violent finish.

Robinson is a strange presence in a role and plot more suited to the late Lon Chaney Sr. Perhaps because someone perceived an "Asiatic" cast to Robinson's Romanian-Jewish features, he plays his part with only minimal makeup, compared to the rest of the cast. From certain angles, or under certain lighting, he seems not to be wearing "oriental" makeup at all. Nor does he attempt a Chinese accent, but neither do any of the other actors. What we get instead is the sometimes stilted dialogue that signified "foreign" in American pop culture, though this movie swings back and forth from the stilted "honorable" manner -- you could play a drinking game based on the use of that word -- to casual "Number One Son" type dialogue for the younger generation. Had the film been made a decade earlier, it probably would have been a Chaney vehicle. But with Robinson, Wellman and Warners involved it becomes more than anything Chaney or his usual collaborators might have made of it. But the story still reads like a Chaney film. It opens with a prologue set "fifteen years ago" with Wong Low Get (Robinson) reluctantly obeying orders to eliminate an old friend, who just happened to have written Wong into his will. Obviously it's not a comfortable situation for anyone, but the victim sees no reason to rewrite his will, which stipulates that Wong is to raise the victim's daughter as his own, and then marry her. The little girl is in the next room playing with a doll as Wong discreetly closes the door leading into her room before sadly doing his duty. We see his shadow pitch his trusty hatchet at the victim's head, and Wellman cuts to the girl's doll, which has just lost its head.
Over the next fifteen years Chinatown has modernized, and a text crawl informs us that tong wars have become a thing of the past. Wong Low Get has modernized and wears modern American clothes in his office. Implicitly repudiating the old ways that led him to kill his friend, Wong is all for modernity, defending his secretary's right to show off her sexy calves -- it's an improvement on footbinding -- and his daughter's right to get a modern education. Wellman cuts abruptly from Wong's high-minded hymn to self-improvement to the daughter, Toya (Young) partying at a dance hall with her unsavory Americanized boyfriend Henry (Leslie Fenton) until she slaps him for getting too fresh. Whatever her plans for the future, Wong intends to carry out his obligation to marry her, but first has to nip a new tong war in the bud. While he goes to negotiate a settlement in his old haunt of Sacramento, the local tong assigns Harry to bodyguard Toya. In Sacramento, Wong finds that a lone-wolf American gangster has been egging on the rival tong. The round-eye says the war will go on until he gets what's coming to him. A newspaper report of his death makes clear that he did get his. Upon returning, Wong discovers Toya and Harry engaged in heavy petting. He's faster with his hatchet than Harry is with his gun and practically chops the younger man's hand off disarming him. Toya refuses to see Harry die, reminding Wong that he swore never to deny her happiness and affirming her love for Harry. This brings on the big moment of melodramatic renunciation as Wong lets both young people go. A Chaney film may have ended here, but the worst is yet to come.

By sparing Harry and surrendering Toya to him, Wong has lost face in a big way. His tong cronies now see him as a coward and shun him. Worse yet, they boycott him, ordering everyone in the tong not to do business with him. They taunt him by delivering a coffin and reminding him that it should hold either Harry's corpse or the remains of Wong's honor. The coffin proves only another thing Wong can auction off after he loses his business. He resigns himself to lowly farm labor until a letter in English arrives from China. To the surprise of probably no one in the audience, Harry proves an asshole and a loser. Caught trying to sell opium, he gets deported, and since Toya never got a birth certificate, she's stuck back in China with him, in a state of "living death." Now she realizes that she loved Wong all along, but as far as Wong is concerned it's never too late to get good new. Now all he has to do is scrape together his savings, get his hatchet out of hock, work his way across the Pacific as a coal stoker, and find Toya somewhere in China. After a lot of walking -- we see him getting his shoes repaired, apparently not for the first time -- he finds his girl, whom the opium-addled, nightmare-haunted Harry has sold to an innkeeper. This discovery sets up an ending that the original audiences reportedly found shocking for its violence yet satisfying in its consequences.

Like Wellman's The Public Enemy, The Hatchet Man is suggestively rather than explicitly violent much of the time. It's most shocking in its presentation of the consequences of violence, echoing Public Enemy in showing us a dead man trussed up and left upright and topping it by having the victim topple backwards off a pier into the ocean. It's that moment that provokes the long-peaceful Wong to take up the hatchet again, and the whole sequence of discovering the body of an employee and fishing him out of the water is the most powerful scene of the picture. At other moments Wellman, admittedly a man in a hurry in those days, misses the mark. He stages an elaborate opening sequence on an impressive Chinatown set as the neighborhood battens down the hatches for a tong war, but he dissipates the impact of his tracking shots by repeatedly cutting back to the image of a war banner every time a gong sounds. There's nothing wrong with crosscutting, but when your alternate shot is nothing but a static image, there's hardly a point to the practice. Overall, the film has nice sets and overall production design, but too many of the players are unconvincing as Chinese people despite heavy makeup (Young's being nearly the heaviest and Fenton's simply the worst) while Robinson makes so little effort to be Chinese, apart from a few "honorables" and the occasional proverb that suspending disbelief is nearly impossible. Robinson remains so compelling a presence, however, that you can just about accept Hatchet Man as just another Robinson picture, which is hardly a bad thing.

You might argue that Robinson's resistance to the expected chinoiserie is in keeping with the picture's implicitly critical stance toward both Chinese stereotypes and old-timey melodrama and pathos. The two phenomena go together: it takes stereotypical character types, not excluding white ones, for the old melodramatic conventions to work, for people to behave in the self-denying, "honorable" ways melodrama demands. Modernity doesn't have to settle for conventions. Toya doesn't have to bind her feet. Wong doesn't have to settle for whatever solace follows from supposedly having done the right thing. Pre-Code audiences -- that is to say, Depression audiences -- weren't as impressed with the pathos of renunciation as they might have been in the otherwise Roaring Twenties. They responded to survival ethics and applauded characters who played to win, from gold diggers to hatchet men. If they could see Robinson's hatchet man as a hero, despite his less-than-superficial otherness, then maybe Hatchet Man was a progressive picture after all. You just wish a little that Warners could have found work for some more Chinese actors during hard times. If they couldn't do without Robinson, then at least he could have buried a hatchet in Keye Luke's bean to save Anna May Wong's honor. But lapses in sensitivity and taste are part of Pre-Code's strange charm, and while they may not redeem this picture for most modern observers, Hatchet Man's somewhat self-conscious struggle with its own stereotyped nature makes it another item of interest for those fascinated by the era, warts and all.

Warner Bros. was great about preserving their trailers, and here's one for The Hatchet Man, courtesy of TCM.

THE ROBIN HOOD OF EL DORADO (1936)

The way the story's usually told, the western genre fell into disrepute with the coming of sound, despite the honors heaped on Wesley Ruggles's Cimarron (1931) only to regain respectability in 1939, mainly on the strength of John Ford's Stagecoach and John Wayne's belated star-making performance. Stagecoach was actually one of several high-profile "A" westerns of that legendary year, along with Dodge City, Jesse James and Union Pacific, but the real story isn't that Stagecoach didn't rescue the western from B-movie disrepute by itself, but that 1939 was really Hollywood's second attempt to re-establish the A western. Three years earlier the majors released a number of ambitious films -- Cecil B. DeMille made The Plainsman before Union Pacific, for instance -- but the westerns of 1936 either didn't have the impact of the 1939 films, or else their influence was slow in being felt. There had to be some reason why Hollywood took more shots at the end of the decade, but looking at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's efforts from 1936 reveals the genre not quite arrived at the classical form it achieved three years later. The M-G-M westerns differ drastically in tone from the 1939 breakthrough films, and the studio may have suffered for it. Metro did not have a film in the 1939 western sweepstakes, and there had to be a reason for that.

While we're looking specifically at William A. Wellman's bandit epic, it's worth mentioning the other M-G-M western of 1936, Richard Boleslawski's Three Godfathers. This was the second of three sound-film adaptations of Peter B. Kyne's story, the most famous being the last, a 1948 Ford film with Wayne starring. Kyne has a tangential connection to The Robin Hood of El Dorado; Metro hired him to write a newspaper serial adaptation of the movie, itself derived from a novel by Walter Burns, as well as uncredited dialogue for the actual picture. It probably goes too far to suggest that Kyne gives a common tone to both films, but there is a common tone to them, a tragic bleakness that would be conspicuous by its absence from the classical westerns that prevailed for a decade after 1939. What Kyne contributes is uncertain, but for those familiar with the Ford 3 Godfathers it will come as a shock to see all the title protagonists die in the Boleslawski version. That film is worthy of its own post, so let's segue to Wellman with an understanding that both westerns have an element of martyrdom to them, a quality that makes the Boleslawski a strange sort of Christmas movie and the Wellman a film slightly out of its time -- virtually a Pre-Code picture released two years into the era of Code Enforcement.

The Robin Hood of El Dorado was written by an odd team of Wellman, Kyne, the chraracter actor Joseph Calleia -- who doesn't appear in the movie -- and six other writers. It's their take on the legend of the California bandit Joaquin Murrieta and an opportunity for Wellman to rework some of his Pre-Code motifs -- violent crime and social injustice -- in western form. His Joaquin (erstwhile Oscar-winning Cisco Kid Warner Baxter) is a good-natured peon getting married around the time that the U.S. occupied California after the Mexican War. The nuptials take place on the property of the local haciendado, but Joaquin is abruptly disgraced when he selflessly takes the blame for his friend throwing a knife at a visiting American officer, rather than see the friend suffer any reprisal. Joaquin himself gets off lightly but is cast off the haciendado's lands. Still an optimist, he starts a new life with his young bride, but their idyll is disrupted by the great gold rush. In an interesting twist on a formula yet to be established, and a touch worth of Pre-Code, the one good white man to move in isn't a prospector but a saloon keeper (Bruce Cabot). In classical "winning of the west" or town-tamer films, the saloon keeper is usually the serpent in the garden, but Bill Warren and his brother are nice guys, apparently because they propose to make their fortune through exchange rather than by taking from the land or from its current occupants. The prospectors are predators by comparison, as proven when four of them try to force Joaquin from his land by breaking in, beating him up and (from all appearances) raping his wife, who dies in his arms. Previously mild-mannered, Joaquin vows mortal vengeance and carries it out with surprising ease, picking off his enemies one by one, usually in broad daylight. He quickly becomes a wanted man, despite Bill Warren's pleas for understanding. Joaquin himself is offended to find himself seen on a level with the vicious bandit Three-Fingered Jack (J. Carroll Naish at his most brutish) and unselfconsciously walks into the sheriff's office to protest against the indignity. The sheriff (a mustachioed and nearly unrecognizable Edgar Kennedy of "slow burn" comedy fame) tries to take him in but gets a knife thrown into his hand for his trouble as Murrieta escapes.

For a time Joaquin lays low on his brother's property, grows a beard and approximates a normal life. But when ugly Americans find some pretext to flog him and kill his brother, he joins forces with Three-Fingered Jack to terrorize California, building not only a formidable gang but a little colony of dispossessed Mexicans whose contribution to the Robin Hood metaphor is to cavort like merry men and women in a couple of ill-advised, virtually operettic sequences that suggest an overall merrier film than what we're going to get. Joaquin's world is brightened a little by the reappearance of Juanita (Ann Loring), the daughter of his old haciendado who'd had a crush on him before, then sees him as a disgrace to Mexicans, but ultimately fights at his side. Everything falls apart, however, after a raid on a stagecoach unintentionally victimizes the much talked-of bride-to-be of Bill Warren's brother and finally turns Warren against Murrieta. Joaquin himself decides things have gone too far and plans to surrender himself in the hope of saving the community that formed around him. Just as at the start of his misfortunes, that is, he wants to take someone else's sins upon himself. But it's not to be this time, as Warren leads a massive posse against Murrieta's camp. What follows, by Code Enforcement standards, is a bloodbath, a fearsome mutual slaughter punctuated by literal rapid-fire editing by Robert Kern, who cuts on every gunshot from one gunman (or woman) to another. Though they give as good as they get, Murrieta's people are inexorably annihilated, the battle closing with a gruesome (for the era) shot of all the dead in their encircled camp, looking for all the world like pioneers slaughtered by Indians -- a symbolic reversal that anticipates a similar battle in Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate. The film itself ends with Warren sadly tracking a mortally wounded Murrieta to an expected destination and a reminder of the original injustice that started the tragedy.

In short, The Robin Hood of El Dorado is just about the opposite of the sort of patriotic epic mode post-1939 westerns usually aspired to. It's a western without a happy ending or even the satisfaction of justice served. It falls short of being a great western partly because of those musical scenes, the reasons for which I understand intellectually while still finding them distractingly wrong in tone, and partly because of the exploitative casting of Baxter as Murrieta. To his credit, the actor isn't simply redoing the Cisco Kid and grows into the  role even as he transforms into something looking more like the Kid, but the overaged Baxter is profoundly wrong for the younger Murrieta -- the real man apparently died in his mid-20s -- and his labored attempt at youthful earnestness, complete with unpersuasive accent, condemns the film to a slow start. Bruce Cabot is underutilized in his admittedly purely functional voice-of-reason role, and the actor, all too typically, is pretty stiff in the part.  Naish gives one of his better performances -- he's less obviously J. Carroll Naish -- as Three-Fingered Jack, while Ann Loring, who made only one more film, cuts a dashing figure as a latecoming heroine. The film eventually builds momentum with action, much of it shot on location, that transcends the limitations of the actors, climaxing in a memorably violent finale. If it seems at times like a Pre-Code western released too late, in other respects it seems like a film ahead of its time in its depiction of race conflict and its refusal of a happy ending. In that particular respect it's probably Wellman's toughest if not his best western, lacking the moralizing coda of The Ox-Bow Incident or outlaws' unlikely redemption and repentance in Yellow Sky. Those films are better than this one, but The Robin Hood of El Dorado is definitely worth a look for western fans, at least, in a direction the genre didn't follow for another thirty years.

M-G-M was very conscious of the place they planned for this film in the lineage of western movies, as the trailer from Turner Classic Movies illustrates.

TRACK OF THE CAT (1954)

As a movie producer, John Wayne deserves credit for, among other things teaming up Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher and releasing William Wellman's film version of the novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, whose The Ox-Bow Incident Wellman had directed a decade earlier. Wellman had made to airborne dramas for and with Wayne, Island in the Sky and The High and the Mighty, but neither those nor anything else the furiously prolific director had made over more than a quarter-century since Wings really prepares one for the in-your-face aesthetic experimentation he unleashes here. That it bears the Wayne (or Wayne-Fellows) imprimatur is perhaps even more staggering. While one can imagine the Duke taking Randolph Scott's place in Seven Men From Now, the mind reels at the prospect of Wayne playing Robert Mitchum's role in this almost freudian "psychological" western.

On the other hand, Mitchum seems to fit the weird world Wellmen and art director Al Ybarra designed for him like a glove. Something about Mitchum seemed to inspire expressionistic excess in the Fifties; Track of the Cat is one of the few films that looks like it might have taken place on the same planet on which Charles Laughton filmed the legendary Night of the Hunter. There's a deliberate artifice to Wellman's presentation that seems still more stark and more deliberate whenever he cuts from the blatant soundstage where the Bridges family lives to the tremendous, man-dwarfing wintry mountain locations where the "black painter" lurks. Without knowing too much about the production history, I presume that the stagy look of the home scenes is absolutely intentional, highlighting the theatrical exaggeration of the snowbound family drama and contrasting the stunted, stifled fate that threatens the younger Bridges children with the gigantic landscape where Mitchum, as the eldest son, hunts the cat and strives to reaffirm his mastery.

Nurture (above) and nature (below) contrasted in Track of the Cat.

The Bridges are perhaps the most miserable family presented in a Fifties Western. We're told that they're powerful ranchers and landowners, but cooped up at home for the winter they appear petty and pathetic, with only the semi-crippled Indian Joe Sam as a servant and young Gwen Williams (Diana Lynn) as a guest for the season. The paterfamilias is a drunk. The mother is a bible-reading harpy whose only concern seems to be with preserving the ranch intact for Curtis (Mitchum) to inherit. The two younger brothers and their sister seem repressed by the attention given Curtis, while Curt himself seems resentful and spoiled at the same time, lording it over his siblings but preferring to roam the mountains. The rampage of a "painter" becomes a family crisis, as Curt's brothers in turn seek to prove themselves, the youngest, Harold (Tab Hunter) torn between duty to family and desire for Gwen, who sees clearly that he'll be crushed by family pressures if something doesn't give.

A view from the grave: Tab Hunter faces a choice between love and death.

A documentary on Clark on the disc makes the novel sound more symbolically pretentious than it probably is, but the main drama of the movie is clear enough. As a spoiled heir and aggressive hunter and enforcer -- we're told he's driven numerous squatters off the ranch -- Curt has convinced himself that he's the master of his fate and capable of anything on his own. He's become a kind of incubus on the rest of the family, the parents focusing their hopes and his siblings sacrificing theirs for his sake. He intends to prove himself again by killing the cat, and seems contemptuous of brother Arthur, even after Arthur is killed by the "painter." Having borrowed Arthur's coat, Curt finds a copy of John Keats's poetry. The most use Curt finds for the pages is as kindling. He's as stunted as his siblings in some ways, but his tragic flaw is his assumption that, however dependent he's been all along on his family, that he is a lone champion and provider. But when he loses his provisions and faces the prospect of starvation, he breaks quickly, while the surviving brother, Harold, rises against the odds to both crucial occasions of his life: standing up to his mother for Gwen's sake and taking up the hunt for the cat.

The story is a little heavyhanded, portraying Curt perhaps too literally as an incubus whose departure promises to redeem his entire surviving family. But that's the kind of thematic excess that seems to go with the visual excess of Wellman's direction in both directions, from the staginess of the home scenes to the god's-eye view of the winter landscape. Wellman testified that he meant Track to look as much like a black-and-white movie as was possible for a color film. Cannily, he accentuates what he's up to by throwing in isolated bits of blazing color like Curt's red coat or the distant glow of a watchfire. He also jolts us with unexpected moments of pure pictorialism, as when he cuts from the family bringing in Arthur's body to a screen-spanning view of the monochrome quilt on which the body will lay. Cinematographer William H. Clothier does a mighty job realizing Wellman's vision, though contemporary viewers might not have appreciated the experiment.

Black and white in color

As a Warner Bros. release, Track of the Cat would have made a fascinating (or infuriating) double feature with another exercise in stylization, Victor Saville's The Silver Chalice. While the adoption of widescreen processes and the hegemony of color drove demand for heightened realism, these films defiantly and recklessly aimed for often alienating pictorial effects. Of the two, Track maintains a steadier balance between style and substance because Wellman is just too good of a classical storyteller to let the film get out of control. In the end, however, style is what makes Track stand out among Fifties westerns. While Boetticher, Mann and Daves strove for naturalistic expressionism, Wellman took the "psychological western" label seriously and tried for the best of both worlds: the abstract aesthetic of the interior world and the turbulent romanticism of western landscape. How well it succeeds is probably a matter of taste for each viewer, but the overall power of Wellman's direction and Mitchum's performance are indisputable.

Pre-Code Parade: NIGHT NURSE (1931)

"The Things They Know! The Things They See! The Things They Do!...She Sees All! She Knows All! She Tells Nothing!"

The trailer for William Wellman's movie promises an expose of previously unseen areas of society high and low. Part of the expose is the life and routine of the night nurse herself and her training as a probationary nurse. Our test subject is Lora Hart (Barara Stanwyck), who needs the work but lacks the credentials, having dropped out of high school to help support her family. In a sequence that sets the tone for the film, the throat-clearing head nurse rejects Lora flat despite her insistence on her capacity to make good, but on leaving she bumps by accident into the prestigious surgeon Dr. Bell (Charles Winninger), who intervenes personally to get her hired -- without any promise of quid pro quo, by the way. Night Nurse repeatedly opposes the formal system of rules (i.e. "ethics") against spontaneous instinctual goodness that sometimes crosses conventional, ethical and legal lines.

Lora's mentor is Bea Maloney (Joan Blondell), a more hard-bitten girl who shows her the ropes and shares her bed with Lora when a intern stuffs a skeleton into Lora's own bed as a practical joke. You can tell that we're in a "pre-Code" movie because Stanwyck and Blondell take advantage of every opportunity the script offers to strip down to their scanties. But even pre-Code cinema has its limits, and the nurses' relationship is strictly Platonic, at best. Blondell plays a generally sympathetic character, but one who lacks Nora's strong streak of rules-bending morality. Though they end up working for the same client as private-practice nurses, Maloney proves of little help in the crisis of the film's second half.

This bedroom scene between Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell might have been the stuff of salacious fan fiction had such stuff existed in 1931. Maybe there's an undiscovered Tijuana Bible somewhere that followed up on the suggestion.

Before landing the private gig, Nora spends some time in the hospital maternity ward in one of the movie's oddest scenes. It's odd because nothing really goes on in it apart from Nora swaddling several babies and handing them to their mothers. But it looks like we're supposed to be impressed if not shocked by the fact that it's a racially integrated ward with white, black and Asian mommies awaiting their kids. We see Nora spend much time washing and treating a black baby, and what seems to be lost in translation for 21st century viewers is the sense of transgression the 1931 audience must have felt witnessing such a scene.

Nora starts bending the rules early, staying out late with Maloney and treating a handsome bootlegger (Ben Lyon) for a gunshot wound without reporting the incident to the police. Only later will this prove to have been the right thing to do. Lyon reappears throughout the film, though only at the end do we learn his name. Until then, Nora knows him only as "Bootlegger," despite his attempt to convince her that he's quit the racket. He's lying, of course, but it will turn out that his crime connections will come in handy for Nora.

She ends up as a private night nurse for the two small daughters of Mrs. Ritchey, a blond floozy who's a self-professed "dipsomaniac" and proud of it while suffering from "neurasthenia." She's a monstrously neglectful mother, and her private physician, Dr. Ranger, is doing nothing to make up for her neglect. Nora discovers that he's keeping the little girls on a starvation diet, enforced by Ritchey's chauffeur, Nick (Clark Gable at his most thuggish, perhaps ever). Nick and Dr. Ranger are plotting to starve the girls to death so that their trust-fund will revert to Ritchey, whom Nick plans to marry or otherwise leech from. Ritchey herself is too blotto to care, driving Nora to violence in her frustration.

Stanwyck wreaks havoc at the Ritchey household.

Nora takes her troubles to Dr. Bell, who proves reluctant to interfere with another physician's case, even though Ranger has a dubious reputation despite his extensive clientele. Medical ethics stays Bell's hand. To Nora, ethics are getting in the way of plain humanity. Her bootlegger pal makes possible a shortcut around conventional ethics when he turns out to be Mrs. Ritchey's hooch supplier. Learning of the Ritchey girls' plight from Nora, he uses special methods of persuasion on Bell, threatening offscreen to take him on the proverbial ride if he doesn't intervene. This forces a showdown between Nick and the good guys, and while the chauffeur is good at pushing around women and middle-aged doctors, he knows better than to go against a presumably loaded gun. Nick himself gets taken for a ride, since the law can't be trusted to eliminate him without a trial that could ruin Nora's career, since she would have to violate informal nursing ethics by airing Ritchey's dirty laundry, and that would make her unemployable as a night nurse.

1931 was Clark Gable's breakthrough year over at MGM, but for Night Nurse at Warners he taps into a vein of evil that arguably wasn't ever seen again.

Night Nurse documents a moment of social breakdown, when the old rules seemed not to work anymore and lawlessness might be a viable alternative to injustice. In a way, it expresses the same impulse as the same period's fantasies of leaders with emergency powers to end the Depression or (ironically in the context of Night Nurse) crush crime. But while such films as Gabriel Over the White House fantasized about leaders ruling by decree, Night Nurse portrays the little people bending or dodging rules that got in the way of people's survival. In that way it might have been a more subversive movie than Warner Bros.' more controversial gangster films, since those usually ended with the transgressor getting his comeuppance. Nora may not get to be a night nurse anymore, but she seems pretty well set up regardless as a gangster's moll, whatever Bootlegger Morty may say about reforming.

During her time at Warners, Barbara Stanwyck was probably the studio's closest female equivalent to its tough-guy stars, James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. Night Nurse brings her quite close to their world, even allowing her to floor a man with one punch. Stanwyck may not be able to match Joan Blondell's hard-boiled attitude, but she radiates a raw power that completely eclipses her sidekick. She's utterly unintimidated by Gable, but she also sells his brute force by taking a hard shove into a door. It's not necessary for her to go toe-to-toe physically with Gable (as she might if Night Nurse were made today) since the moral of the movie requires the "good bad man" bootlegger to do the right thing at the crucial moment. By that point, Stanwyck has more than established her tough-chick credentials.

Night Nurse is one of seventeen movies William Wellman made from 1931 through 1933, mostly at Warner Bros. This one is on the Forbidden Hollywood Collection Vol. 2 box set, while six more Wellmans make up Vol. 3. On the evidence of these films (not to mention The Public Enemy) Wellman was one of the dominant directors of the early Depression years, shooting out films with rat-a-tat frequency and fairly consistent quality. There are still plenty of Wellmans from this little epoch awaiting rediscovery, but Night Nurse stands out as an exemplary pre-Code film as well as a representative Wellman product.

Pre-Code Parade: MIDNIGHT MARY (1933)

Watching two movies about John Dillinger recently showed me two sharply contrasting images of the "gun moll," the archetypal gangster's girlfriend. In John Milius's 1973 film, Michelle Phillips portrays Billie Frechette as a kind of wild child who turns into a machine-gun firing hellion, one of Milius's valkyrie figures. In Michael Mann's new film Public Enemies, Marion Cotillard invests Frechette with a degree of class that transcends her poverty, but renders her an exclusively romantic figure. Her Billie takes some serious abuse in defense of her man, but never for a moment becomes an action heroine. It made me wonder how the moll was portrayed in a film that Dillinger and Frechette might have actually seen.

Leave it to William Wellman to deliver the goods. As I've mentioned before, Wellman was on an incredible tear in the early 1930s, unleashing 17 features from 1931 through 1933, mostly for Warner Bros. Midnight Mary finds him on a job for Metro Goldwyn Mayer, but working with at least one familiar face. In the same year, Loretta Young appeared in Wellman's Heroes For Sale at Warner as the hapless helpmeet of damaged war vet Richard Barthelmess. In this film she's the title character and the star of the show.

Despite coming from a different studio, Midnight Mary is in some ways a distaff version of Heroes For Sale. Both films have protagonists who had it rough long before the Great Depression hit so many other Americans. It gave me a different sense of the Depression term "forgotten man." I now take it to mean someone whose long-term privation predates the general misery that followed the 1929 crash.

Mary Martin's tale of woe is told as a flashback as she sits in a court clerk's office waiting for the verdict in her trial for murder. She gazes at a library full of annual volumes of court minutes and remembers her past, starting with the death of her mother in 1919. We first see her and her best friend Bunny (Una Merkel) romping in a junkyard, poor from the beginning, when Mary gets the news. A suspicion I had at first sight seems to be confirmed by the lack of child actress credits for this film at IMDB. If I'm right about this, then an artful combination of hairdressing and oversized clothes equipped Loretta Young to play her character at the age of nine. I know she was reputed to be ageless, and I remember seeing a Vanity Fair photo of her in her late eighties that seemed frighteningly to confirm this, -- but this is ridiculous. Somewhat more plausible is her reappearance as a thirteen year old arrested by mistake for Bunny's attempted shoplifting and sentenced to three years in a reform school.

Free and sixteen, she's reunited with Bunny and flirting with gangsters Leo Darcy (Ricardo Cortez) and Angelo Ricci (Warren Hymer). They go out on a joyride (see below) and the girls find themselves acting as lookouts for a robbery. Leo pays Mary $50 "for being a good girl," but her conscience can't take it. She dumps the bill in a Salvation Army kettle and attempts to live honestly before the threat of starvation (and this is still only 1927) takes her back to Darcy's gang.

She now becomes a full-time moll, the job description including infiltrating a society party with Bunny, who fakes a fainting spell at a pre-determined time. Leo and Angelo are disguised as ambulance drivers who respond in advance to the expected distress call.

Warren Hymer and Ricardo Cortez (the original cinema Sam Spade) in Midnight Mary.

Also at the party are Tom Mannering (Franchot Tone), a young lawyer and wastrel, and his sidekick Sammy Travers (pre-typecasting Andy Devine). Mary and Tom meet cute in the confusion and, separated from her gang, she goes home with Tom to avoid the cops. There follows a classic pre-Code dialogue sequence worth quoting at length.

Mary: Are you ever serious about anything?
Tom: No. What is there to be serious about? The income tax? Tonsils? The
decline of the white race?...Of course, there's always sex. How do you feel
about sex, Potter? Or... do you?
Potter (a servant): At this hour of the night, sir, it would be almost
impossible to know.
* * *
Tom: Now what do you suppose made me think of sex?
Mary: I can't imagine. Most men never do.
Tom: I'm the intellectual type, myself.
Mary: Me too.
Tom: Of course, sometimes my baser nature gets the better of me.
Mary: And that's the beast in you.
Tom: How well you understand me.
Mary: Mm-hm.
Tom: By the way, do you have any plans for the rest of the evening?
Mary: Well, let me see...Oh, we could wake up your father and play 300
pinochle.
Tom: I can think of better games than that, can't you?...Haven't you just
about finished your supper?
Mary: Why?
Tom: We're not going to waste the rest of the night sitting here, are
we?
Mary: Oh, I forgot to tell you.
Tom: What?
Mary: I'm really a kitchen sitter at heart.

Indeed, Mary intends to leave once the hubbub outside has died down, and she calls a cab to take her home. But once she sees cops parked across the street, she tells Tom that she can't go back, and asks him to find her honest work. When she says she can't go back, does that mean she's going to stay with Tom? Pre-code cinema invites you to figure that out for yourself. In any event, Tom places her in a secretarial school and ultimately gives her a place in the law firm he runs with his father. He may be making a kind of honest woman but he can be ruthless about it, telling an underling to fire somebody to make room for her. Nor is he the only man in the office who has the hots for her. A relatively elderly partner loses it one night and practically throws himself on top of her until Tom breaks it up. At that point, her realizes that he'd better claim Mary as his own. Marriage seems imminent until a chance encounter with a cop who was wounded in the ambulance job and recognizes Mary as one of Leo Darcy's gang. This sets up one of those annoying noble sacrifice moments when, to protect Tom's reputation, she suddenly blows him off and tells him she was just manipulating him. She walks out on him and surrenders to the cop. That earns her three years in prison (nothing lurid there, alas), but Darcy and crew welcome her on her release because she never ratted them out.

During her sentence, Tom got married to a society girl but he isn't happy with her. In turn, as Darcy realizes that Mary still carries a torch for Tom, he grows violently jealous. A chance encounter between the two men turns into a brawl, with Tom ending up on top. Darcy vows revenge and is about to go out to shoot him when Mary, recovering from a beating, grabs one of those guns that stupid villains will always leave laying about in this kind of movie and drills Darcy. Cortez gets a vaguely creepy death scene that reminded me a little in its dehumanizing effect of Jimmy Cagney's finish in The Public Enemy. His body slumps down against a door, and as his pals try to push their way in, the corpse quivers in rythm with the pounding on the door, while Mary in her temporary madness starts bobbing her cute little head in the same rhythm. This brings us back to the present as the jury come in with their verdict....

I get the feeling that Wellman had reached the point where he could put a film together in his sleep, and such was his pace that he might have had to sometimes. I don't mean that Midnight Mary is just thrown together, but that he had achieved a daunting efficiency that most likely made this easy work for him. It's a speedy film at 74 minutes, and Wellman makes the film go faster still, doing away with dissolves in favor of a kind of horizontal wipe that literally shoves one scene offscreen in favor of another. It conveys the relentless passage of time in Mary's memory and gives the impression of a picture-book narrative of an archetypal story. At the same time, he finds time for quiet, melancholy moments. In the clerk's office, Mary recalls Bunny's attempt to console her after their first night with the gangsters. In flashback, we see Bunny tell her, "What's the diff, Mary? A girl's gotta live, don't she?" Then in the present, staring at the law books, Mary answers: "Not necessarily, Bun. The jury's still out on that."

The cast is uniformly good and the production values are typical for MGM. Midnight Mary is no masterpiece, and an ending that spares Mary at least temporarily thanks to Tom's last-minute intervention is a bit much, but it's further proof of what looks like a fairly consistent level of quality in pre-Code Hollywood that might not be matched today. Any fan of classical American cinema is likely to enjoy it.

MataMachree has uploaded not only the trailer to YouTube, but the whole movie in installments, if you want to take a look at no expense but time. The trailer you can see here.