The Late Show

Will we perhaps need something to lift us from the December Doldrums? I propose a Blogathon!

I’ve been meaning to try this for a while, but haven’t for the same reason I never throw parties — supposing nobody comes? But I’m not too bothered — it’d be business as usual at Shadowplay, a week of daily posts, whether anybody else contributes or not. But if anybody does, it’ll be even better. Just send me the addresses of your posts and I’ll link to them from a post of my own.

The theme was suggested earlier this year when I dined with fellow bloggers Glenn Kenny and Farran Nehme Smith, AKA the Self-Styled Siren, in New York, and it was the Siren’s idea: late films. I think we might go so far as to specify LAST films, but I don’t want to be too rigid about that. The idea is that late in many filmmakers’ careers, when they’re no longer in fashion, they often produce work which is underrated at the time: it’s compared negatively to their Golden Age work, and to the hip hits of the moment, and then consigned to the dustpile. But with nearly every great filmmaker, whatever the problems of the late films (often produced on low budgets, sometimes literally shot in the filmmaker’s back garden), they nevertheless encapsulate the mature reflections of great artists, and are worth appraising with an open mind.

The idea isn’t restricted to directors — writers, producers, composers and actors and whatever else are welcome too — I guess the filmmaker in question should be dead or retired though, so that the status of “late” is a definite one, marking the end of a career and not just a pause.

In keeping with the “late” idea, the end of the year seems good timing, so I propose the week of December 14th to 20th 12th to 18th. If you think you’ll be too busy then, write it now! I was going to go for the very end of the year, but I was afraid normal people will be too busy to read it then.

Wicked Women

It’s easy to be a little down on Capra: the sentimental overdosing (he always pushes it further than you think he can, and then he pushes it too far), the pretence of saying Big Things about Society without ever actually doing so, the political prevarications. But I may turn up at some of Edinburgh Filmhouse’s forthcoming season of Capras to reconnect to his virtues and see if I find them substantial enough.

A movie like PLATINUM BLONDE, which is enjoyable enough in its own right, kind of invites resentment because it’s easy to get a copy of it, while many superior pre-code movies are obscure and unavailable. Blame Capra’s fame for getting that movie out there at the expense of, say VIRTUE (1932).

Lombard with the magnificent Shirley Gray Maya Methot.

Written by Robert Riskin (future Capra support) from a story by Ethel Hill, deals with a woman (Carole Lombard) being run out of New York for prostitution, who meets a hardboiled but not-so-smart-as-he-thinks cabbie (Pat O’Brien) and falls for him. After they’re married, as they save to buy a garage, the truth comes out and sours things. Dramatic developments ensue.

Then I watched PICK-UP (1933) in which a woman (Sylvia Sidney), fresh out of prison after a “badger game” (yeah, I had to look it up too) went sour, meets a hard-boiled but not-so-smart-as-he-thinks cabbie (George Raft) and falls for him. They don’t get married, but save to buy a garage, the truth comes out and sours things. Dramatic developments ensue.

What’s fascinating is how two such similar stories play so differently. Edward Buzzell’s film is the mini-masterpiece, benefitting from Lombard’s sophistication and an unusually winning turn from PO’B, even when he’s being a jerk. As the title suggests, the issue is Virtue, and the movie makes the point, possible only in the pre-and-post-code era, that true virtue has nothing to do with sexual purity. The moral heroes of the film are a pair of prostitutes who do the right thing at cost to themselves.

This is inspiring stuff in a mainstream film from any era, and it’s helped by Lombard not asking for our sympathy — she plays it sassy and earns our sympathy. Riskin’s dialogue keeps it brisk and witty — after Lombard makes a crack about O’Brien’s homely kisser, his complacent whine, “Say, my face is okay!” is followed by her “Yeah, okay for you: you’re behind it.”

It all snarls up in a not-wholly-plausible thriller plot involving (yes!) Jack La Rue as a (yes!) murdering swine, and, as in PICK-UP, there’s a courtroom climax with our gal falsely accused. Check how speedily the coda wraps things up.

(Watched this with our friends The Browns. Ali is a professional costume designer, and while both were wowed by the snappy patter of depression America, she was particularly taken with the skilled use of headgear. Modern movies are quick to throw out the hats, for fear of concealing the actors’ eyes, a supposed problem which VIRTUE takes in its stride, with chic results.)

Sylvia Sidney in PICK-UP is more the whipped dog, playing put-upon rather than pert, a more on-the-nose interp which is effective but doesn’t have the Lombard magic. But she scores with her beautiful Bronx accent and that face! That smile! In a modest departure from the VIRTUE mold, SS has a ratfink hubbie (William Harrigan) in the stir, so she can’t marry Raft (an acceptable perf), and so he gets tempted by a dizzy society dame (Lillian Bond) who finds him simply too “he-ish”.

You may be wondering how anybody could be tempted away from Sylvia, but this is Lillian Bond (also seen in THE OLD DARK HOUSE) ~

Impressive, although, as Fiona observed, she’s “sucking in that gut” in the manner of the late Robert Mitchum.

Things soon get back on track — Raft gets wise to himself, Sylvia is on trial for a crime she didn’t commit, things get sorted out through a piece of wildly incredible courtroom shenanigans and love finds a way, although the lawyer gets the garage as part of his fee.

The title card shows an actual Fanny Magnet in operation.

PICK-UP was smoothly directed by Marion Gering, of DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA and 24 HOURS fame. In place of Capra, I might actually suggest everybody spends the next ten years watching Marion Gering, Rowland Brown, Edward Buzzell and of course Del Ruth, LeRoy and Dieterle in their pre-code phases. More radical, more peppy, more beautiful.

The Sunday Intertitle: The Deep

Only sort of an intertitle — sort of a sur-title too. It’s kind of like an illustrated intertitle too. As the song issues from the phonograph, the lyrics are superimposed over the speaker…

The movie is THE NAVIGATOR, a Buster Keaton triumph enjoyed by my students last week. I was inspired to write about Keaton’s uncanny side by this sequence in which Buster and Kathryn McGuire (better-used than in SHERLOCK JNR) are terrorized by nocturnal sounds on a deserted ocean liner. And my recently-acquired 1933 Film-Lovers’ Annual offers a useful way in –

“I was a youngster travelling with my parents’ act when a ventriloquist joined the show. Now, of course, the first thing a youngster learns in the show business is to leave other peoples’ ‘props’ alone. But the dozen talking dummies the man used fascinated me.

“After the matinée, I used to sneak back into the theatre and get up on the dark stage where the dummies hung in a row under a piece of canvas. I would pull the canvas back and watch them in awe. The ventriloquist noticed it–and stayed in and hid with the dummies one afternoon. I came in, and pulled back the canvas.

“‘Well, what do you want?’ boomed the biggest dummy. I think I cleared the orchestra pit and reached the front entrance in nothing flat! And I’ve never monkeyed with a ventriloquist’s ‘props’ since.”

This could well be a publicist’s invention, like so much else in the book, but it does chime nicely with a little-remarked section of STEAMBOAT BILL JNR’s famed hurricane sequence, where a concussed Buster is terrorized by a seemingly animate marionette, like something out of DEAD OF NIGHT. Since so much of Buster’s comedy is predicated upon the hostility of the universe, which “monkeys with its props” in order to give the unfortunate humans a hard time, it’s apt that this tendency sometimes takes on a downright supernatural appearance. In THE NAVIGATOR, the effect of Donald Crisp’s malign portrait swinging past Buster’s porthole, alarming him in his bunk, captures a universal childhood fear to perfection (fear of sea captains? No, I mean it captures the universal childhood sensation of fear), and thus gets audiences hysterical. That particularly virulent form of laughter that’s tinged with terror…

Dummies. They ARE creepy. A friend was so traumatized by the moment at DEAD OF NIGHT’s climax where the dummy walks, he literally ran from the room in panic. Years later, he invited a friend to watch the film, giving it a big build up. When the moment came, he sensitively warned his friend that it was approaching… the dummy stood… and he ran from the room in panic again.