The Dirty Thirties

Time for another pre-code round-up. During Fiona’s nasty flu a few weeks back, we watched a bunch of early thirties Hollywood flicks — usually just over an hour long, snappy and fun, they’re easy to follow but hard to predict.

CHINATOWN NIGHTS

Not a hit with Fiona, this 1929 William A. Wellman gangland epic seems to have been a silent movie hastily sonorized: wide shots toddle along at 20 fps, with all the signs of having been post-synched: lip-flap and unconvincing background atmos galore. Meanwhile the close shots have been cheaply re-shot to incorporate dialogue.

While it’s impressive how quickly American film developed a fluid and expressive approach to filmed speech, it’s always interesting to catch them unprepared during the first couple of years: Florence Vidor, as a socialite slumming it in the Chinese ghetto, is terribly stilted, and even Wallace Beery and Warner Oland are painfully slow and careful in their enunciation. Seeing a gangster minding to sound his ‘T’s clearly is oddly dispiriting. Seeing Wallace Beery as a tong boss is plain surreal, but at least he’s not in yellowface. Somehow a big Irishman has gained control of one of the two principle gangs: no explanation for this is ever offered.

Just a few years later, and SAFE IN HELL shows Wellman at his hard-boiled peak. Dorothy McKail is supremely naturalistic, but there are as many kinds of naturalism as there are people. She seems quite unconcerned about looking pretty (Wellman hated actresses who fussed about their looks) and does odd things like continuing her dialogue while kissing Donald Cook on the lips. “Mmmff-mmf-mm!” she’ll say. Crisp enunciation is a thing of the past.

The plot sees her as a prostitute fleeing a manslaughter rap with sailor boyfriend Cook, and holing up in the one place without any extradition treaties, a repulsive tropical hell aswarm with caterpillars and fugitives from justice. These include Gustav Von Seyffertitz, Charles “Ming” Middleton and Victor Varconi, who see to it that the atmosphere of grubbiness is soon almost unbearable. Like FRISCO JENNY, this is one of Wellman’s tales of female sacrifice, and it packs quite a wallop.

Here’s the hangman’s POV of McKail.

Iris-in on neck! I’m fascinated by these survivals of silent film technique in the talking era. I don’t wonder why they’re there (at odd occasions), I wonder why they died out, since they seem to broaden the expressive possibilities of the medium. And they’re easier to achieve than tracking shots in the era of the microphone and heavily blimped camera.

Equally offbeat is Wellman’s THE PURCHASE PRICE, in which showgirl Barbara Stanwyck becomes a mail-order bride to George Brent to escape the attentions of racketeer Lyle Talbot (what a choice!). Wellman’s vision of rustic America is as rambunctious as his Warner pictures about bootleggers, hoboes and women of easy virtue. Wellman insisted on cramming his early talkies with camera movement, although it’s less flamboyant than his late silents like WINGS. He also claimed to have invented the microphone boom to facilitate this, a discovery that probably took place all over town (Dorothy Arzner is another parent to the boom) as filmmakers struggled with the medium.

Yikes.

SMART MONEY is courtesy of Alfred E Green, and is the only movie to pair Edward G. Robinson and Jimmy Cagney, who turn out to have great chemistry, though Cagney has the decidedly smaller role. Robinson plays a gambling barber who builds a casino empire just by being lucky, and “dumb enough to think he’s smart.” Their interaction includes this terrific bit of pantomime –

An uncredited Boris Karloff shambles by, Evalyn Knapp and Noel Francis supply glamour of a kind (all the women are funny-looking thin blondes) and towards the end there’s the nicest image I saw all week –

Racism is very much in evidence, some of which falls under the heading of “accurate representation of 1931 American society” and some of which is just offensive. The fact that the black servants are all utterly servile and accept being called “stupid” as a matter of course is sadly credible (we never see what they’re like when the white folks aren’t looking) but the fact that the movie portrays them as stupid is just obnoxious. One character is called Suntan.

The movie is also offensive to women and dwarfs, but it takes a sympathetic line on Greeks, so I guess that’s something. Also, Edward G Robinson has a surprisingly pert bottom.

Oh come on — YOU’VE ALL THOUGHT IT!

The Sunday Intertitle: When Buster Met Boris

Screened Keaton’s THE GENERAL for students, along with clips of Chaplin, Lloyd, Langdon, Charley Bowers and of course good old Raymond Griffith. And this time, projecting my Kino DVD on the big screen, I noticed something new –

That’s Boris frickin’ Karloff there, as a northern general! Front left.

I’m not the first to spot this: the IMDb has him down as “unconfirmed”, but after watching him carefully, I was pretty much convinced. Not only does the northern general have Boris Karloff’s face, but at one point he makes a Boris Karloff face. You know, one of those faces Boris makes when he’s acting. He has several.

That makes THE GENERAL the 11th film Boris made in 1926, including also THE BELLS, where he’s a sinister mesmerist. I find it apt that the great monster makes his one noted appearance in a silent comedy burning the hero’s elbow with a cigar.

Louise Brooks noted that one shot of Buster hiding under the table in this scene was so beautiful it took her breath away. She lost the ability to laugh for a good ten minutes, so awe-struck was she. “Why didn’t he cut the shot?” she wondered. But in fact, as Richard Lester pointed out, what makes THE GENERAL “a masterpiece of economy” is that you can’t remove a single shot without the sequence collapsing, nor a sequence without the story collapsing. What this means, of course, is that if a single shot had failed, Keaton would have no film. But then, he was working in an age when, if a shot didn’t come out right, you could just go back and do it again: everybody was under contract, so all it would cost you is raw stock and petrol.

Unless you want to do something like THIS –

Now Wash Your Hands

Boris Karloff, dusky-hued in BEHIND THAT CURTAIN.

Boris again, dusky-hued again, in ISLE OF THE DEAD.

It’s Boris Karloff’s birthday!

It was only last year that I learned about Boris’s Indian ancestry. It seemed to make so much sense. It accounts for the darker pigmentation around his eyes, and may even account for his stage name: by assuming a Slavic name, William Henry Pratt could account for his colouring without admitting to any non-white heritage. This was in an age when the British spoke of someone like Boris having ” a lick of the tar-brush.”

Even if his appearance were accounted for, Boris still found the only parts he could get were exotic types, and sinister westerners. Without the simple ethnic explanation, those shadowy eyes became a repository for malevolent projections. Or maybe he was just naturally scary-looking.

Still, Boris had more range than he’s credited with: see FIVE STAR FINAL, an excoriating attack on yellow press scandal sheets from Mervyn LeRoy and Warner Bros. Eddie Robinson is the editor who destroys a whole family with his muck-raking tactics, and Boris is boozy reporter and sex pest (“Don’t get in a taxi with him”) T. Vernon Isopod. He’s grotesque, yes, simpering and slurring and lisping and leering, but he manages to be hilarious until the sheer repulsiveness of his profession tips him over into monstrousness of a different kind.

Happy Birthday Boris!