Captain Applejack

A little bit of research on the Broadway Database website confirms that the play Captain Applejack ran for 195 performances in the 1921-1922. It's the kind of fluff that people went to the theater to see back in the day, but wouldn't have any great audience today.

Watching it this morning two things struck me. It reminded a whole lot of George M. Cohan's Seven Keys To Baldpate which also takes place on a windswept stormy night with a group of strange characters intruding on someone's privacy. Further research shows that the producer on Broadway was Sam Harris, Cohan's producing partner who probably thought he had another similar show on his hands.

I also thought how perfect Leslie Howard or Ronald Colman would have been for the part. The film would be more well known today had either of them done it, though John Halliday does a fine job in the lead. He plays a comfortable squire with an estate in Cornwall who yearns for a more exciting life and expresses same to ward Mary Brian. Before long he's besieged by visitors who are giving him all kinds of stories and he discovers the family fortune may have had its foundation in stolen pirate loot.

Captain Applejack is a most dated item, fortunate indeed to have been preserved in both a silent and sound film. I doubt you'll see it revived on Broadway any time soon.

I'm watching this antique Old Dark House mystery on TCM right now and it quickly became evident to me that the film, its first silent incarnation ("Strangers In The Night") or the play it was adapted from were the first kernel of inspiration for Belgian comic book artist Hergé (Georges Rémi)'s "Secret of the Unicorn" and its sequel "The Treasure of Rackham the Red" (1943-1944). More proof that a large part of the inspiration for Hergé's melodramatic adventures were from sometimes second-rate Hollywood movies and plots that were very creaky to begin with. What he did with them of course was sheer genius and entirely original. But the basic idea was this: An ordinary man discovers that he is the descendant and inheritor of a famous pirate's treasure hidden somewhere in an old house. In the process, he has flashbacks of being the pirate himself, which is just what happens to Captain Haddock in those comic books.

Of course, not all of Hergé's inspirations were "second-rate". One might also reflect on the similarity of the ending of Sacha Guitry's "Les Perles de la Couronne" (The Pearls of the Crown, 1936, finally available on DVD in the US) and the ending of Hergé's "L'Oreille cassée" (The Broken Ear, published as a serial starting in 1935 and ending in 1937).

"Captain Applejack" (1931) with John Halliday, Mary Brian, Louise Closser Hale, Kay Strozzi, Alec B. Francis, Claud Allister, Julia Swayne Gordon, Arthur Edmund Carewe, Otto Hoffman, and William B. Davidson is the perfect example of how tastes change over a one hundred year period. This began as a play in 1921 which ran again in Chicago in 1923, the same year it was turned into a silent film called "Strangers of the Night" (Otto Hoffman played the same character he played later in the '31 version); then this film was made. By 1931 the story was already very much old hat. This film was directed by Hobart Henley, and the sound effects of wind and rain are ceaseless and by the end annoying and very fake. The film is a mystery/crime/comedy/Old Dark House drama. How do you combine all of these? 1920's stage could easily do this, and it was very popular. With films like "Frankenstein", "Dracula", "The Old Dark House", etc., etc., etc., the genre developed well over-and-above what "Captain Applejack" seemed to be. It is loads of fun in its own way, but only to a crowd that enjoys what was being done in 1931 and before in theater transferred to the movies. To a modern crowd this film will be laughable! It's supposed to be in some respects: it's made to be smiled at the whole way through. The audience is supposed to smile WITH it. But this will be now laughed AT.

Halliday, playing Ambrose Applejohn, is bored with all, and so has put up his old family mansion for sale. Seems that several are aware that somewhere in the old place a vast treasure is hidden that was put there centuries before by an earlier ancestor pirate called Captain Applejack. These several come in all shapes, sizes, sexes, and job descriptions, from Russian something-like-a-countess to a cop. Strozzi's accent, by the way, is over-the-top just-plain-awful!! Not that her acting is any better. The former Broadway actress (1912-1936) only made one other film. She had been in a play in 1929 with Halliday, so their combo may have been because of the acquaintance.

This is pure camp which I had seen once before years ago in an inferior print. The one I watched last night was the Warner Archive Collection release, and its sound is very, very antiquated and now truly scratchy and bad. It's a Vitaphone sound release, and almost sounds as though it's still sound-on-disc! Discs worn out!

If you watch this as if it were a play being shown in a theater in 1929/30 you'll enjoy it a lot and for what it is. If you watch it from the viewpoint of a filmic endeavor of 2021 you'll turn it off within five minutes. I've now seen it twice all the way through. It was fun. But this kind of fun only needs to be experienced once or twice before it wears itself thin to the falling-through point. When you fall through you could hurt yourself, but only pride-wise...

There was in the 1920s on stage and the 1930s in the movies a genre of 'Old Dark House' shows, so-called for the J.B. Priestley novel of the same name. Priestley's novel was eventually made into a wonderful movie by James Whale with some great stars playing people with ordinary problems who are forced to take shelter from the storm in an ancient house inhabited by lunatics.

But what, this movie asks, do you do if you live in an ancient house, you are bored out of your mind and a horde of lunatics descends on you during a storm? Well, you have this movie, which is quite all right, although not a patch on Whale's movie, being hampered a bit by competent but not great actors, stagy direction and a plot which distracts you from the potentially interesting performances. Definitely worth a look, but you won't be coming back for a second show.

THE STORY & GENRE -- Aristocratic home holds secret pirate's treasure which brings forth crooks. Not genre.

THE VERDICT -- Brisk and zany comedy, grade bumped up a notch for love of the ward (Mary Brian). Also some pre-code naughtiness. 6.5.

FREE ONLINE -- Yes, foreign websites from a TCM broadcast, 63 minutes.