Pre-Code Parade: MAKE ME A STAR (1932)

Merton of the Movies began its existence as a short story by Harry Leon Wilson. Two knights of the Algonquin Round Table, George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, made it into a hit Broadway play in 1922. It was first made into a movie, now lost, two years later.  Paramount remade it as a talkie and for some reason redubbed it Make Me a Star. Did the studio executives worry that the story was already old hat in some eyes and needed to be disguised? Almost a generation later, M-G-M would take a crack at it and went back to the original title. It makes you wonder whether there's something qualitatively different about the Paramount film, directed by William "One Shot" Beaudine from an adaptation by three writers. Based on the evidence on the screen, one could believe that Make Me A Star is a somewhat darker version of the Merton story. It definitely taps into a sense of desperation appropriate to the Great Depression, especially when compared to Harold Lloyd's treatment of a similar subject the same year in Movie Crazy. That film was old hat insofar as it was the same old Lloyd persona from silent days, the bumbling but indefatigable go-getter, trying to make it in Hollywood. By comparison, Stu Erwin's title-fulfilling performance as Merton in Make Me a Star is a portrait recognizable to modern viewers of a troublingly obsessive personality, vested with as much pathology as pathos.

As spoken in the film by Merton Gill, the title is a prayer to God. Stardom is Merton's only possible escape from the small-town hell where he works as an assistant shopkeeper. His obsession ultimately estranges him from his adoptive father, who tells Merton that if he wants to get to Hollywood he better catch the morning train. Merton, of course, is only one of a talentless multitude trying their luck in the movie capital. His would be a dull story if he were only talentless, but the genius of the story is that he's pretentiously talentless. Merton is dedicated to the high dramatic art of moving pictures, despising comedy, but his idea of high dramatic art is the Buck Benson series of B-westerns (at best) made by Majestic pictures. In Hollywood he's determined only to work at Majestic, a mirror-universe version of Paramount where many of the real studio's real stars work and appear in pretty pointless cameos for publicity's sake. He haunts the Majestic casting office for days and weeks waiting for an opportunity, insisting that his correspondence-course acting class entitles him to consideration for speaking parts rather than extra work, until hard-boiled studio girl "Flips" Montague (Joan Blondell) takes pity on him and pulls strings to get him a bit part with one line in a Buck Benson picture. In an all too predictable progression, he nails the line in rehearsal but finds different ways to botch it in each live take, finally nailing it again after he's been thrown off the set and the crew breaks for lunch.

After noticing his absence for several days from the casting office, Flips finds Merton foraging for scraps in the wreckage of former sets, lamenting how he'd stashed a plate of cold beans inside a desk only to have the desk taken away. He'd never left the lot because he was afraid he'd never be allowed back on after his debacle. Flips tries to find work for him and finally convinces the studio's comedy producer to try him out. The diabolical idea is that Merton, using his chosen screen name of Whoop Ryder ("I bet there's a story behind that!" Jack Oakie opines) will star in a parody of the Buck Benson films. The key to the comedy, the director believes, is for naive Merton to play the part absolutely straight according to his idea of high cinematic art. He must not be allowed to realize that he's in a comedy picture, and he's clueless enough for this to be relatively easy. The only stumbling block is the casting of Ben Turpin (himself), a vulgar comic Merton despises so much he can't even call him by name, referring to him only as "the cross-eyed man." He accepts the explanation that Turpin has long aspired to change his image and prove himself as a dramatic actor. Special effects will take care of the rest.

The sneak preview of the Whoop Ryder picture is a hit with the audience but a nightmare for Merton and Buck Benson. Benson can't stand the parody of himself, while Merton can't stand that he's being laughed at after being tricked by the studio. Beaudine films this so you empathize with Merton; the comedy isn't very good, really, yet people are making braying asses of themselves laughing at it. In a Producers-like reversal Merton is poised to be a comedy star but he's ready to head back home in self-imposed disgrace, until he hears two studio men talk about the genius of his performance. Then, determined to prove to Flips that he's no fool, he returns to her to explain how he knew what was going on all along. Parroting what he'd heard from the studio men, he tries to build himself up into a comic genius until he breaks down in the girl's arms. It's a brilliant climax to what's probably the best work Stu Erwin ever did on film and a genuinely great performance, eloquently incoherent, naively insane, vaguely disturbing but indisputably sympathetic. The irony of it, at least as the publicists told it later, was that after this picture Erwin could have written his own ticket in Hollywood, but turned down a lead role in a forthcoming Paramount picture because he didn't feel ready for stardom. I wonder whether you can draw a line linking that self-analysis to the performance he gave and how much of himself he put in it.

Wendigo Meets SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE (2000)

Those of you who saw us use a quote from E. Elias Merighe's movie as an epigraph for our review of the Spanish-language Universal Dracula probably figured that it'd just be a matter of time before we got to Shadow of the Vampire itself. So here we are, re-watching Merighe's alternate-universe account of the making of F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu. Wendigo and I agree that we shouldn't take the film within the film as the Murnau movie we know, nor Merighe's movie as a reflection on the historical Murnau. Once Merighe and writer Steven Katz came up with the high concept that the legendary and mysterious Max Schreck was an actual vampire (Willem Dafoe), there was no point to further fidelity to the history of Nosferatu. Thus, all "Schreck's" scenes are filmed at night when the real Murnau probably shot not a frame of film after sunset. The big "gimme" also licenses Shadow's creators to invent their own Murnau (John Malkovich), Albin Grau (Udo Kier) and cast of actors, so that their film is hardly about the making of Nosferatu, or even the mystique of Murnau's film, but some strange satire of their own art.

This isn't your great-grandfather's Nosferatu; 'outtakes' from Shadow of the Vampire.

Wendigo would say that Shadow is really a movie about movies, a meditation about the mystique of the director and the obsession moviemakers have with making movies. There's a certain narcissism to it that alienates Wendigo, who happens to be unimpressed by Katz and Merighe's implicit psychological self-criticisms. He's not much more impressed by their equation of moviemaking with vampirism, a theme announced by Greta Schroeder's (Catherine McCormack) complaint that the movie camera sucks the life out of her. The Shadow Murnau is a monster if not a metaphorical vampire, a pretentious Weimar degenerate (if not also a proto-Hitler) willing to sacrifice cast and crew for the sake of his dubious art. If anything, he even vamps the vampire, or tries to. The film's sadomasochistic Murnau gets some thrill from the power game he plays with "Schreck," who we learn was a decrepit survivor of vampirized Slovakian nobility. The main thread of the film is Murnau's struggle to dominate Schreck, rather than the vampire's ravaging of the Nosferatu crew. When I first saw the film, I took offense at a seeming insult to F. W. Murnau, but Wendigo realized before I did that Shadow is less about the real Murnau than some abstract caricature of the autocratic director, presented by Katz and Merighe with questionable sincerity.  Does Merighe really see himself, as a director, that way? Does he see directors in general that way? You have to wonder.

Above, 'Herr Doktor' Murnau in action; the implication that film directors are mad scientists probably isn't accidental.

What's in it for Max Schreck? Katz leaves a lot implicit, but Wendigo noticed two main motivations. The most obvious one is the vampire's obsession with the actress Greta Schroeder, which itself requires some explanation. He recognizes the woman in Jonathan Hutter's locket as Schroeder and breaks "character" to identify her. How does Schreck know her? It's one of the film's most fascinating questions. I assumed initially that Schreck had to have gone to the movies, but Wendigo suggests that Murnau might have shown Schreck a picture of the woman while recruiting the vampire, and that the photos might have been enough to leave Schreck smitten.

"I'd like some makeup."

More interesting to Wendigo is Schreck's overall interest in cinema, illustrated in a charming scene when the vampire putters with a film projector on an abandoned set. Wendigo speculates that Schreck's real interest in moviemaking is the possibility of making a permanent record of himself. Over centuries the vampire has forgotten many details of his existence, but film promises not just a permanent record but a kind of immortality that might persist beyond his eventual demise. If Merighe's Murnau is the archetypal autocrat director, his Schreck is the archetypal obsessed fan. Shadow is a tale of interlocking, codependent obsessions, in which Shreck's smittenness ultimately overcomes his survival instincts and undercuts his physical dominance of Murnau. This vampire is fatally caught in the beam of the movie projector; the sun is almost redundant.

Willem Dafoe is the first actor to be nominated for an Oscar for playing a vampire. Wendigo was impressed by his elaboration on a physical impersonation of Schreck, the additional touches Dafoe created like Schreck's nervous habit of clicking his long fingernails together, as well as the rare moments of groping memory ("It was woman" who made him a vampire) and introspection, like his critique of Dracula we quoted last month. Since he's not playing the real Max Schreck, Dafoe is licensed to create a character almost from scratch, and he makes the vampire a more complicated character than Malkovich's somewhat-typical weirdo. Dafoe doesn't have Shreck's facial structure, and under the makeup he sometimes looks more like Alexander Granach's Knock, Nosferatu's bozo-haired Renfield surrogate, but most of the time the makeup evocatively establishes Schreck's alien nature. Still, Wendigo ultimately deems Dafoe a derivative shadow, however talented, of the uncanny, irreproducible original. Neither Dafoe nor Merighe is really aiming for the pure frightening effect that Murnau and Schreck achieved, but the modern creators' greater sophistication doesn't make Dafoe's Schreck a better performance than Schreck's Orlok. As for the other notables, Malkovich is simply bad, while Udo Kier lends surprising gravitas to any scene Albin Grau is in. Given his wacky past, Kier is setting a new standard for aging gracefully.

Overall, Wendigo likes Shadow of the Vampire a little less after the latest viewing. Greater familiarity with Dafoe's performance and his makeup makes them slightly less impressive now, and Katz's pretentious satire of moviemaking rang more false for both of us. It's still a singular high concept that's worth a look from vampire fans, though since it's more a movie-movie than a vampire movie, it may not satisfy everyone. I've seen it as a variation on King Kong, with Merighe's Murnau in the Carl Denham role, while Wendigo would include it in a broader category of movie-movies that would include Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead. These have in common a character's obsession with moviemaking taken to impractical and unrealistic extremes. Wendigo has a hard time imagining that people pursued by monsters or witnessing atrocities would keep a camera rolling no matter what. He sees the point that the directors of the actual films want to make, but he doesn't really believe it. And he wants me to say that Malkovich's Murnau is more a Jack Black Denham than a Robert Armstrong.

To repeat, Shadow of the Vampire may not please every vampire or movie-movie fan. Perhaps the sequel of my imagination would work better. I'd like to see Werner Herzog make a film in which he claims, first, that Klaus Kinski was really a vampire and, second, that he's never seen or heard of Shadow of the Vampire. Better still: all of this, but with an actor playing Werner Herzog, down to the accent, while Herzog's still alive. I don't know whether Herzog would kill me out of rage or envy....

Welcome to MONDO 70

What is MONDO 70? It is not a "Mondo" movie, but it can be about one. It is not from 1970, but it can be about the '70s. That you might mistake the name for a movie title of a certain kind from a certain time is no accident. I hope it conveys some of the flavor of the blog to come.

MONDO 70 is dedicated to extraordinary films. I look for something out of the ordinary in movies. That doesn't mean I'm an escapist or interested only in fantasy, but it does mean that I abhor the mundane in cinema. This is not the place to look for reviews or romantic comedies or teen coming-of-age films, unless they are old enough or foreign enough to tell us something interesting about their time or place. Even with that rule set, exceptions are possible, but you'll more likely find "genre" cinema here; films that are not dedicated to seamless imitation of so-called real life, but instead display signs of reel life -- that vitality of imagination, inspiration or desperation that can justify a movie's existence.

MONDO 70 is international in scope and steeped in history. Every movie made is actually a documentary in that it shows us something real, whether that be a writer or a director's vision, the labors of actors, or the social and cultural milieu from which each show arises. Arguably, the less refined, the less slick, or simply the less competent the production, the more it becomes a documentary, as failing illusions reveal the creative struggles before our eyes. Sometimes this can have a paradoxically inspiring effect. Watching Al Adamson's Dracula vs. Frankenstein, an especially bad horror film that nevertheless has a certain elan that more superficially successful shows lack, I felt more inspired to make movies (if only!) than by many other films that impressed me more otherwise. The bad films show us simultaneously how hard it is to make movies (well) and how easy it is -- or how easy it was in an earlier time.

MONDO 70 is more than bad movies. It will be a showcase for those films and their makers that I consider worthy of recognition among the canonical classics. Some will already be in many people's canons; others may remain below most people's radar. MONDO 70 is a product of my infatuation with DVDs and the opportunity they've given me to discover great directors like Jean-Pierre Melville and Kinji Fukasaku whose work I'd barely been aware of before the turn of the millennium. The object, however, is not to impose criteria for greatness, but to emphasize that these and other directors will deliver distinctive moviegoing experiences for discerning viewers.

MONDO 70 is founded upon three principal resources. First, my own DVD collection, including the indispensible compilatons of public-domain obscurities from Mill Creek Entertainment as well as the canonized showpieces of the Criterion Collection; then that commendable public resource, the DVD collection of the Albany Public Library, which offers everything from the newest popular releases to a healthy selection of international product, all for free, ableit on a first-come-first-served basis; and the on-line library of Movieflix.com, which overlaps the Mill Creek inventory but includes many items not readily available in the 50-movie sets. Together, these resources allow me to scan high and low, old and new, the good, bad and ugly, in search of novelty, visual stimulation, and the occasional outrage.

This blog probably won't be updated as frequently as my political blog, The Think 3 Institute, but I promise reguarlity at least. I consider it my weekend project, an alternative to political or social commentary that I can spare time for now that the presdential election is over. I hope that slow and steady will win the race for me, or at least, keep me going. I've seen movie blogs race out to flying starts only to slow down drastically and stagnate as inspiration fades or everday burdens catch up with people. For better or worse, I have fewer domestic resposibilities than other people might, so I expect to be make new reviews and other posts available at least on a weekly basis. With that in mind, I'd better get started, lest this look like the old bait-&-switch with nothing behind the ballyhoo. I hope you enjoy it.